Q&A: Why Apple’s future in China is its biggest liability

When Patrick McGee set out to write Apple in China, he wasn’t chasing the AI hype cycle. His focus was firmly on hardware and how Apple’s perfectionism quietly reshaped China’s industrial landscape.

In this wide-ranging conversation with Tech in Asia, the author unpacks why Apple’s China entanglement remains its biggest risk, why Vietnam never got its iPhone moment, and offers a quick take on Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s hardware project.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Tech in Asia: Your book came out around the same time as Karen Hao’s Empire of AI. Do you think it’s harder to capture readers’ attention with a hardware-focused topic? Did you struggle with it during the writing process or after the book was released?

McGee: No, I’d actually say the opposite. I’m a few chapters into Karen Hao’s book – it seems to be good and has quite an original take. But I would have more struggles pitching an AI book, simply because there are already so many AI books. That is the big topic.

In journalism, if everybody is zigging and you can zag, that’s phenomenal. I was worried during my year off that someone from, say, the Wall Street Journal would write some major feature on Apple’s China problems. They never did – everyone was focused on AI.

It’s bizarre that we don’t cover Apple as a manufacturing company, or that its history doesn’t typically include manufacturing. But Apple was a manufacturer for about 27 years. When it moved to offshoring, it only did so because Tim Cook convinced Steve Jobs that Apple would retain control.

Readers are not interested in this for hardware’s sake, but they are interested in the second- and third-order effects of what it means to have a perfectionist mindset when designing a computer.

Everybody understands the version of Steve Jobs who yelled at people and bullied them, and in doing so, raised the standards of everybody around him.

But we’ve confined that narrative to like, two dozen people around him, whereas my narrative is about how Apple takes that mentality and transplants it into China – the world’s largest country. It says that [what] Steve Jobs did ended up raising quality standards across multiple industrial clusters in hundreds of factories in China. That’s a crazy narrative.

TIA: You didn’t quite get into China until Chapter 6. Why is that?

McGee: I don’t think the average person realizes that Apple didn’t always make its own products. For example, almost nobody knows that the LaserWriter printer was actually built in Japan by Canon. That was the first time Apple really started using contract manufacturers.