Apple in China Quotes

“Steve Jobs had once said of hiring people: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“iPhone accounts for less than a fifth of global smartphone shipments but garners 80 percent of industry profits.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“Fighting for excellence is about resisting the gravitational pull of mediocrity. It involves being dead tired and still pushing yourself, and others, to get it right, every time.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“Quite simply, you don’t get to do business in China today without doing exactly what the Chinese government wants you to do. Period. No one is immune. No one.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“One of the narrative arcs of this book is how Apple”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“Even if things go smoothly”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“Jenny Chan”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“The assessment was sobering: Chinese brands had accounted for just 23 percent of global smartphone shipments in 2013”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“But one week later”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“But that’s precisely what Trump wanted. “Tim”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“When Beijing asked for The New York Times to be removed”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“In China”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“The flexibility of Chinese labor was a key ingredient in the secret sauce that allowed Apple to function so efficiently. China didn’t have plentiful labor just because it was a large country; the state orchestrated second-class migrants into a “floating population” of more than 220 million adult workers—a larger workforce than that of the entire United States. State-backed organizations commissioned companies to drive buses into rural areas to hire unskilled workers—so-called dispatch labor—and move them to Apple’s vast network of suppliers for seasonal production. Internal documents obtained for this book detail how Apple’s need for Chinese labor would fall below 900,000 in the slow months of spring”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“Churn was especially high around Chinese New Year”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“Years later”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“But these forecasts were shortsighted and had ignored the wider societal interests of the West. If electronics assembly was now primarily based on low-wage labor and scale”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“Quitting time at IBM’s offices in Raleigh”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“It would be banal to say that Apple wouldn’t be Apple today without China. There is no other place on earth that could have provided similar cost”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“But this is where Guthrie’s argument”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“If something was too easy, ID would push the envelope even further. In the making of the Mac Mini desktop around 2004, one engineer recalls Ive asking if he could make the computer such and such a size. The engineer said he could. Ive narrowed the dimensions and asked if he could build that. The engineer said he could. So Ive minimized the dimensions again. This time the engineer said, “No, no, that would be really difficult.” And Ive said, “Great, those are the dimensions.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“Besides Luxshare, the other three major indigenous contract manufactures making Apple products are BYD Electronic, a major supplier of hardware enclosures and assembler of iPads; Goertek, a maker of AirPods and AirPods Pro; and Wingtech, which manufacturers Mac Mini desktops and MacBooks. These groups collectively reported $6 billion of total revenue in 2015; by 2020 their revenues had quadrupled to $25 billion, and in 2025 their sales are expected to exceed $52 billion. Apple has been instrumental to their success, shifting orders from Taiwanese leaders Foxconn, Wistron, Pegatron, and Quanta. As David Collins, an Asia-based manufacturing consultant, said of the Red Supply Chain in late 2020: “Foxconn’s share price is down roughly 50% from two years ago. They see blood in the water.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“The technology transfer that Apple facilitated made it the biggest corporate supporter of Made in China 2025, Beijing’s ambitious, anti-Western plan to sever its reliance on foreign technology.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“The iPhone accounts for fewer than 20 percent of smartphones sold around the world, yet it routinely boasts more than 80 percent of industry profits.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“Only a dozen multinationals earn more than $10 billion a year in China, and Apple tops the list with around $70 billion.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“When Apple shifted production to China in the early 2000s, Washington believed that free trade would help develop a middle class and inculcate democracy in what was then the world’s most populous country. Instead, economic success empowered China’s rulers, reinforcing their once-tenuous hold on the country and enabling Beijing to weaponize its manufacturing might. As one former Apple engineer puts it: “We’ve trained a whole country, and now that country is using it against us.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“How Apple got out of this mess was a surprising twist, the stuff of novels. Donald Trump had ascended to the US presidency threatening Apple; instead, he saved it. In May 2019 the Trump administration alleged Huawei was a security threat, citing alleged ties with the Chinese government and the potential for its communications equipment to be used for espionage or cyberattacks. It soon imposed unprecedented sanctions, depriving Huawei of Google services, including the Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, and other Android tools—a crippling blow for Huawei phones distributed outside of China. Washington also disallowed American companies from shipping fifth-generation cellular chips to the group. Phones equipped with 5G had only just started taking off.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“Part of the tiled floor was left so bloodstained that Apple had to replace the stones.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“The license for a family-owned sewing machine repair shop became the legal basis Apple used to establish a multibillion-dollar retail presence”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

“The presentation was so good that some executives at BlackBerry maker Research in Motion thought it was faked somehow.”
― Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company