Apple spent many years and billions of dollars investing in China. Now it's stuck there.

Peter Kafka

Wed, May 14, 2025, 3:01 AM 7 min read

• Donald Trump wants Apple to make iPhones in America.

• There's no chance that will happen, says Patrick McGee, a journalist who just published a book on Apple's deep ties to China.

• McGee also argues that Apple's end-around on Trump's China tariffs — saying that some iPhones and other products are made in India and Vietnam — is misleading.

You probably know that your iPhone, and just about any other Apple product you own, was made in China. And that Donald Trump wants Apple to move all of that production to the US.

But do you know how, and why, Apple ended up so dependent on China — and why that's so unlikely to change?

Patrick McGee says he does. He's a journalist who just published "Apple In China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company" — a detailed look at all of the money and effort Apple spent over decades to enmesh itself in China.

McGee, who has covered Apple for the Financial Times, explains why this has been enormously helpful to Apple — because it created an ecosystem that lets it make ultra-complicated devices at vast scale. But he argues that it was even more helpful to China — because Apple gave Chinese engineers access to valuable technology that has let them build other high-value supply chains.

And that McGee posits, has created both a problem for Apple CEO Tim Cook — because he can no longer practically extract the company from China — and for the US — because its adversary is now using American know-how to compete with American companies.

(I asked Apple if it wanted to weigh in on McGee's book. Via a rep, the company said that "claims in the book are untrue" and "filled with inaccuracies" and that McGee didn't fact-check the book with Apple.)

I talked to McGee for the newest episode of my Channels podcast. In the edited excerpt below, we talk about why he thinks it's impossible for Apple to move iPhone production to the US. And why McGee thinks that Apple saying it's moving some production to India and Vietnam, in order to escape some US tariffs on China, is deeply misleading.

Peter Kafka: The Trump administration says it wants Apple to move all of its manufacturing to the US. You and anyone else who knows anything about Apple saying that is literally not possible when it comes to the iPhone. Why?

Patrick McGee: We're lacking so many things. The density of population is one. Lots of people know a factory town [in China] might have 500,000 people just putting together the iPhone. The thing that people don't understand is they're not doing that year-round. They're doing that for three or four months.