Book Review — Apple in China by Patrick McGee

If Apple were a myth, this book is the demystifier.

Patrick McGee, a longtime Apple reporter at the Financial Times and winner of the San Francisco Press Club Award, gifts us with a deeply researched, fiercely intelligent 400+ page account of Apple’s unlikely survival and global supremacy. Published in May 2025, the book is ambitious in scope.

And if you thought you knew Apple’s story, prepare to be stunned.

Not long after you start the book do you see McGee show us Apple teetering on the edge of irrelevance. In 1996, Sun Microsystems offered to buy the company, which is today worth more than $3 trillion, for $2.8 billion, less than its then, market value. Apple scoffed at the offer. But Sun’s CEO Scott McNealy wasn’t lowballing them out of malice. He was, in hindsight, generous. Apple’s stock would soon crater below $15. From there, it took a herculean reinvention to claw back to relevance.

“Unfortunately, Apple’s trajectory toward oblivion was so clear…”

The quote is chilling in retrospect, and it sets the stage for a tale of resurrection powered by Steve Jobs’ unusual genius and a singular partnership with the most powerful country in the world: China.

The chapters take us deep into the guts of Apple’s supply chain, into factory floors and back channels. We learn that “Foxconn”, the megafactory synonymous with Apple, isn’t some sleek Silicon Valley invention. The “conn” stands for connectors. “Fox” was just an animal founder Terry Gou liked.

More revealing is how Foxconn operated at a loss for Apple in the beginning. Why? Because Gou saw the future. Working with Apple was like getting a PhD in manufacturing, and suppliers were willing to absorb the cost just to soak up the knowledge. McGee captures this brilliantly.

“Working with Apple is really fucking hard,” suppliers would tell him. He’d respond: “So don’t.” And they would demure: “We can’t. We learn so much.”

Apple became a de facto teacher of industrial excellence, its suppliers students in a global classroom built on ambition and burnout.

One of the book’s most powerful lines doesn’t come from McGee himself, but from a characteristically unvarnished interview subject:

“It’s not merely that Apple has exploited Chinese workers, it’s that Beijing has allowed Apple to exploit its workers, so that China can in turn exploit Apple.”

This statement, in a single sentence, captures the industrial marriage between Apple and China, each using the other to achieve something extraordinary. Apple perfected the art of product development. China perfected the infrastructure, labor system, and policy muscle needed to execute it. China would not be what it is today without the investments of Apple in the country. Sounds like an overstatement. It’s really know once you read about the scale of Apple’s operations and influence as China developed.

But the cost? Human. Strategic. Possibly existential.

A lot of books have been devoted to Jobs, but it is Cook I find more fascinating. If Steve Jobs (who was wrong many times in his business decisions) was Apple’s soul, Tim Cook was the circulatory system. McGee traces Cook’s rise from an Alabama childhood to IBM’s elite leadership grooming program, and finally to Apple, where he was poached alongside other brilliant IBM alumni like Jeff Williams.

Cook’s obsession with detail and discipline transformed Apple’s operations. He wasn’t flashy, but he was fearsomely effective.

“Cook wanted only A-list players. No hard feelings if you didn’t fit in. Those who stayed, adapted. It might not have been fun. But it was effective.”

There’s something militaristic in McGee’s portrayal of Cook. He isn’t a visionary. He’s a tactician. A quiet enforcer. The man who turned chaos into cadence. And as Apple’s China reliance grew, so did his importance.

#WIL How the iPod was created was unexpected. Tip: Toshiba had a part to play. Even better was how Gorilla Glass became a thing in smartphones. The book reveals the details.

Still, not all threads are tied and exuding details. For instance, why did Apple choose InventTech over Foxconn to produce the iPod when Foxconn had already proven its competence? And how exactly did Apple neutralize the Yakuza threat in Japan? These moments are tantalizingly introduced, but left hanging.

Another gem is McGee’s account of Apple’s relationship with the media. When journalists declared “Apple R.I.P.” even after signs of recovery, the company didn’t flinch. Entrepreneurs, McGee makes us realize, can’t afford to listen to every headline. They focus. They execute.

“The stock’s one-day collapse wiped out nearly all the gains made since Gil Amelio’s departure. A story called ‘Apple R.I.P.’ in Forbes demonstrated how tenuous Apple’s future felt.”

And yet, here we are. Apple didn’t just survive. It exploded. It’s now in the top most valuable companies on earth.

If the first half of Patrick McGee’s book is about Apple’s resurrection, the second half is about its reckoning. This is where the company’s global entanglements begin to look less like a triumph of efficiency and more like a slow-motion trap. One it helped build, one it never anticipated, and one it can’t seem to escape.

Even without reading it, the reader begins to see that Apple had no grand strategy for China when they got in to manufacture and then to sell. They just flowed with the tide and got stuck.

McGee does a remarkable job illustrating how China didn’t just make it easy for Apple to manufacture there, they made it irresistible.

“Nobody in the West can ever understand how China [attracts] so many factories. You’re given land. They’ll build the infrastructure for you. If you expect the buildings, they’ll build them for you. They’ll help you with interprovince migration… The caveat is: you better deliver on your export commitments.”

That Faustian deal of short-term execution, long-term dependence is the scaffolding of Apple’s global empire. It allowed Apple to claim 80% of smartphone profits while selling fewer than 20% of devices. It enabled profit margins that still stagger analysts. But it also birthed a vulnerability.

Because now, Apple is stuck in a geopolitical minefield.

With escalating tensions between the U.S. and China, Apple finds itself in the worst place possible: everyone’s favorite hostage. Beijing needs Apple to keep its tech edge. Washington needs Apple to prove its supply chain patriotism. And Apple? Apple needs both.

It’s not just the factories. It’s the status symbol Apple has become in China, “like when the first cars came out,” one user quips. It’s the reseller networks (“yellow cows”) that corner regional markets. It’s the regional party officials who expect smooth performance and minimal noise. Apple didn’t just enter China. It became part of the fabric. Now pulling out is like tearing muscle from bone.

India? It’s the fallback. But McGee shows that it’s nowhere near ready.

Still, the reader is surprised that Apple is able to move that fast to quickly producing in other countries despite all that had been previously discussed in the book.

Surprising, yes. But not scalable. Not yet.

If there’s one moment in the book that’s as hilarious as it is revealing, it’s how Apple executives played along with Trump’s “Made in America” fantasies during his first term. Publicly supportive, privately dismissive.

Apple’s production isn’t coming back to the U.S., not because it doesn’t want to, but because it can’t. America doesn’t move fast enough. Doesn’t build cheap enough. Doesn’t permit efficiently enough. Doesn’t especially have the ecosystem needed.

“In America… nine months wouldn’t be enough time for a greenfield site to have attained the permits to start building.”

As someone who recently read “House of Huawei by Eva Dou”, this book is gratifying. Huawei, despite sanctions, emerged as a quality competitor. Its technological ambitions have been nationalized. Its defeats, politicized by Washington. And still, it’s clawing back market share. McGee doesn’t give Huawei undue credit, but he doesn’t underestimate them either. Ren Zhengfei would be proud.

Meanwhile, as a Nigerian, McGee’s silence on Africa is deafening. As Apple scrambles for new markets, Africa, home to over a billion people, barely registers. It’s a missed opportunity. Here is a continent in serious need of what Apple offers — both technologically and industrially — unable to attract arguably the world’s most enigmatic company. It’s a shame that a continent as big as this cannot get its acts together to be able to offer Apple things it cannot refuse.

Isabel Ge Mahe. She was brutally eviscerated in the book. Want to know the details? Check Chapter 34.

As Tim Cook’s legacy begins to take shape, McGee draws a parallel that is at once flattering and foreboding: Jack Welch.

Cook, like Welch at GE, mastered operations. Trimmed fat. Extracted profit. But did he build a company built for the future? Or one built for Wall Street?

Cook’s challenge isn’t execution. It’s vision. Apple needs a new why, not just another how.

McGee’s book is part confession, part autopsy, part survival manual. It is not sanitized PR. Nor is it anti-Apple. If anything, it’s a love letter to the company’s brilliance and a plea not to waste it.

The takeaway?

Apple is a miracle. But miracles, like margins, don’t last forever. I hope Apple survives as a result of this book.

I have read some great books this year. This is arguably my best book yet.