While it was one of Apple’s most powerful computers, the American-made Mac Pro also turned out to be one of its most expensive.Ĭhinese suppliers shipped their components to Texas. Compensation for similar jobs in the United States is significantly higher. Apple said the starting pay for workers assembling its products there was about $3.15 an hour.

The minimum wage in Zhengzhou, China, home of the world’s biggest iPhone factory, is roughly $2.10 an hour, including benefits. Cook has also disputed that cheap labor is the reason Apple is still in China. Apple points out that Corning, at a factory in Kentucky, makes many iPhone screens and that a company in Allen, Tex., makes laser technology for the iPhones’ facial-recognition system. Cook often bristles at the notion that iPhones are Chinese-made. Cook helped lead Apple’s shift to foreign manufacturing in 2004, a move that cut costs and provided the enormous scale necessary to produce some of history’s best-selling tech products. Apple’s Texas manufacturer, Flextronics, did not respond to requests for comment. Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokeswoman, said the company was “an engine of economic growth in the United States” that spent $60 billion last year with 9,000 American suppliers, helping to support 450,000 jobs.

“In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” he said. Making Apple products requires state-of-the-art machines and lots of people who know how to run them, he said. Cook said at a conference in China in late 2017. The company’s executives are increasingly worried that its heavy dependence on China for manufacturing is risky amid the country’s rising political tensions with the United States and unpredictability, this person said. The company could face more financial pressure if the Trump administration places tariffs on phones made in China - something the president has threatened to do.Īpple has intensified a search for ways to diversify its supply chain, but that hunt has homed in on India and Vietnam, according to an Apple executive who asked not to be named because the executive was not authorized to speak publicly.

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