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      How Tim Cook Steered Apple to New Heights'¦ and Dependence on China

   Josh Centers

   Austin Carr and Mark Gurman have authored [1]a profile of Tim Cook for
   Bloomberg Businessweek, exploring how Cook took the baton from Steve
   Jobs and propelled Apple to once-unimaginable heights. In short: he
   offshored production to China, cut every possible cost (even down to
   fractions of pennies), and managed every aspect of production (with
   Apple employees supervising factory floors to spot inefficiencies). In
   the process, he greatly expanded Apple's product lines, all while
   playing politics with a deft hand.

   That's not to be dismissive of Cook's success. Unlike Steve Ballmer's
   Microsoft, in which the company made more money than ever while
   struggling to maintain its core products, Cook's Apple has developed a
   wide variety of new products and services. While some products might
   have temporarily stagnated (such as the Mac mini and Mac Pro), no major
   product has rotted on the vine. And Apple, under Cook's leadership, has
   pseudo-miraculously churned out new products even as the global supply
   chain buckled under the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

   But the Bloomberg story has a deeper and more concerning context: the
   inability of countries outside of China, especially the United States,
   to build products at scale. One of the more depressing aspects of the
   article are the stories about troubles at Apple's Mac Pro plant in
   Texas, run by contract manufacturer Flex, with difficulties in
   acquiring components and problems with inexperienced workers. The
   article all but admits that it's impossible to build such high-end
   electronics in the United States today. In contrast, Foxconn
   transformed an empty field in China into an iPod nano factory in mere
   months. Apple has taken steps in recent years to offload production to
   India and Vietnam, but the company has struggled with scale and quality
   issues in those countries too.

   There's no question that Cook's Apple both says nice things about
   social justice and puts its money where its mouth is (see '[2]Apple
   Launches New Racial Equity and Justice Initiative Projects,' 13 January
   2021). Regardless of these efforts and Apple's [3]Supplier
   Responsibility policies, the more reliant Apple is on Chinese
   manufacturers, the more open it is to criticism of supporting a double
   standard, given the Chinese government's actions with regard to Taiwan
   and Hong Kong, its Uighur population, and dissident voices of various
   stripes, among numerous other social and environmental concerns. We
   live in a global economy, but the need for more geographic diversity in
   manufacturing has become clear, given the supply chain shortages of the
   past year. Here's hoping Apple shows the way there, rather than
   continuing its focus on China.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-09/this-is-how-tim-cook-transformed-apple-aapl-after-steve-jobs?sref=ExbtjcSG
   2. https://tidbits.com/2021/01/13/apple-launches-new-racial-equity-and-justice-initiative-projects/
   3. https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/

   Hidden links:
   4. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2021/02/Tim-Cook.jpg

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