Author Patrick McGee Talks Apple in China

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

Safe to say, we follow Apple so closely. We love talking with our Mark Gurman, who follows it very closely. It is, of course, one of the largest market cap companies in the world. A company whose brand, whose products, whose supply chain, whose deafness in managing tricky politics in the United States and in China is revered by many. And yet, as investigative journalist, Patrick McGee wrote in his New York Times bestseller, that was named by The Times, by The New Yorker, by The Washington Post, by Foreign Affairs, by The Globe and Mail, as one of the best books written in 2025 He writes about the rise of Apple and how it led to an even greater rise by China and perhaps at a huge cost, or implications certainly for the company and maybe for the world at large. Patrick is a former journalist at the Financial Times. His book was out in May of 2025, but with everything going on, we wanted to bring him in and I'm going to be quite honest. I was listening to a podcast with Anthony Scaramucci before he came on. Patrick, he mentioned your book. He loved it. He loved it.

It is entitled Apple in China, The Capture of the World's Greatest Company, and Patrick is joining us on this Friday from the Bloomberg News San Francisco Bureau. It is great to have you here. It is a company we talk about so much. Then we think about the rise of China as well.

I want to ask you, when you set out to write the book, did you have an idea of the story that you wanted to tell, or did it really evolve as you dug more and more into things?

Patrick McGee (1:36)

I wrote a 70-page book pitch to get the book deal. I certainly had a pretty clear sense of what the book was going to say, but nevertheless, I ended up being flabbergasted by the extent to which Apple had a massive influence on China. If you've read the book, you know that the thesis in my sense is that Apple had a nation-building-like influence on China. It would be trivial to say that Apple wouldn't be Apple without China. I actually argue that China wouldn't be China without Apple. It's a sort of thesis that sounds, I think, pretty unhinged, even bonkers. But if you go through the 400 pages, I think it's pretty well stacked up.

So I didn't think that I was going in that direction. I was trying to write a standard corporate history of how Apple became the most valuable company on the planet, and ended up writing something that had geopolitical implications. The likes of which I had de minimis understanding before tackling the project.

SPEAKER_4 (2:24)

Well, I think what's so notable is what happened since he wrote the book. And that's the fact that Tim Cook is out as CEO, but he remains as executive chair. And in his role as executive chair, he continues to meet with the heads of state of many countries throughout the world, including China, including the United States. And just in the last couple of weeks, he was at that state dinner with Xi Jinping in Washington, DC. On the individual, the people who made this possible, who at Apple was the most responsible for Apple's role in China?

Patrick McGee (2:57)

That's a good question. I mean, I don't want to give the boring answer of Tim Cook, but of course he was the CEO since 2011 I mean, it certainly wasn't Steve Jobs, right? Steve Jobs, as far as I know, if someone wants to prove me wrong, go ahead, never stepped foot in China in his whole life. So as instrumental as he was for Apple and product design, he was not the guy running operations or making the decisions, never went to China.

SPEAKER_4 (3:19)

But Tim Cook, yeah, go ahead, sorry.

Patrick McGee (3:23)

But Tim Cook was there all the time. Now, that being said, Tim Cook traditionally goes to China two or three times a year, and it's certainly not difficult to find people who were living in China on behalf of Apple, or going there so many times per year, that they would say the idea that Tim Cook is the reason that either we're succeeding in China or whatever is faintly ridiculous, because of course he's more orchestrating things from Cupertino, but there are people on the ground, in the weeds, training suppliers and that sort of thing. So it's not a particular individual. I would say it's the unit called manufacturing design, a unit within Apple that specifically goes from Cupertino, or from other parts of Asia, but traditionally from Cupertino to factories across Asia, and over time, increasingly directly to China, to train up factories. We're talking millions upon millions of people were trained at the behest of Apple to meet their quality demands, and then to learn how to retain that quality as they scaled. And the result of that was the formation of entire industrial clusters devoted to building something like the iPhone, which of course goes from 5 million units in 2007 to 230 million by 2015