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Patrick McGee

lines on the record: 44
first: 2025-07-29
most recent: 2025-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That they put out press releases about India, let alone the problems they could have with Beijing for sort of uparming. No one knows better what it means to have Apple in your country. And so Beijing does not want to see machinery and Chinese people with experiential know-how setting up rival production lines in Karnataka.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Uparming, America's biggest adversary, day in, day out, and it's continuing right now. That strikes me as a very The other thing is that, yes, they are having to move to India. So, this is where I said I'm going to sound like I'm contradicting myself. But that's more to do with tariffs on the part of Trump imposing them on China, but probably even more so on Narender Modi imposing them on China for imports into India. So the more that they can make in India for the local market, which is, of course, now the world's most populous country, the more it makes sense for them. I don't know that you would call that de-risking from China. It's a different paradigm. It's just that they're building for an emerging middle class in India. But as they do that, China, of course, isn't happy about it. And so the more that Apple accelerates their investments into India, which is something I would love to see, the more that there are tens of millions of customers in China would say, hey, wait a minute. Instead of this looking like an indigenous product, you're becoming the poster child for de-risking from our country. And so they risk immediate consumer backlash.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The founder of Huawei has called Apple the teacher. If that's what you're hearing from your own great entrepreneurs, why would you want to upset that relationship? Apple is providing intangible value at Marshall Plan-like scale every two years or so. So they can feel safe in that respect. So one thing I say is that although I do quote someone saying the relationship with China could blow up at any time, and that's a risk, the other risk may be less intuitive, is just that this continues. Because it works very well for Apple and it works very well for Beijing and hundreds of companies in China. But, you know, the Western order is like, to use the economics jargon, the collateral damage here. Like Apple is, however absent-mindedly, however willingly.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's such a nuance to this answer. So, to some extent, Apple actually doesn't feel like they need to be really decoupling from China. Now, I'm going to contradict myself in a minute, but just to be clear, Xinjiang's interests and Tim Cook's interests are pretty similar, which is to say that China offers all kinds of things for Apple and has demonstrated a successful ability to build $230 million iPhones for the company year in, year out. And as a result, Apple's worth $3 trillion and pulls in $100 billion of revenue at great margin every year. Why would you want to sort of upset that relationship? And so Apple actually feels pretty safe with Beijing. Like, I think it's astonishing that they don't really have a plan B as Xi Jinping becomes more like the Putin of China, but they feel safe because they've demonstrated in closed-door meetings the effect that Apple has on China. I mean,”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dynamic between Tim Cook having to navigate these two cultures is just like it's where the story just becomes so much more about Apple. This is about capitalism. And it's just like capitalism and geopolitics told through a company that you think you know. And yet I think there's just all kinds of details that nobody was really familiar with. And so, yeah, hopefully that's what makes it such a sort of riveting read, right? When people call it a thriller or something, like, I don't want to sort of quote myself calling it a thriller, but I absolutely know what they mean. It's a fast-paced book densely packed of information. And I don't care if you care about Apple or not, you'll care about the narrative because it relates to sort of the most iconic devices of the 21st century, the smartphone and all the related peripherals around it.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This team of people that ends up calling themselves the gang of eight, first senior people living in the country, despite Apple having a presence there since 1993. And their whole role is to basically learn how to exist, to coexist in China in a way that the government, all the way from Beijing to the local cadres in whatever region they're in, aren't going to put up obstacles to their production. So there's sort of a multi-year charm offensive, and that culminates, if you will, to Tim Cook pledging this massive investment at Jean Dunhai. And fascinatingly, this is when Trump is running for president on America first and actually telling his users to boycott Apple for a host of reasons we don't need to get into. So the dynamics at play are just phenomenal where Apple is investing heavily in a country that's becoming very adversarial just at a time when domestic politics in America are becoming America first like just leading to the Trump administration. And so this sort of”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In China. It took a while to understand that really what Xi Jinping was doing was getting rid of his rivals to consolidate power. And this is sort of the prologue of the book. So it's really quite central to the thesis. Arguably the very first entity to understand Xi Jinping's authoritarian turn was Apple. And that's a stunning thing to say, but it's because within 36 hours of Xi Jinping becoming the president in March 2013, Apple is attacked by state-sponsored media. And when they offer this sort of weak response, there's a three-week digital blitzkrieg in which state-sponsored social media accounts, newspapers, and television shows are attacking Apple. And this is the period when Apple realizes, oh, shit, essentially, we don't understand Chinese politics. We don't understand Chinese culture. We don't understand why they're attacking us. And so they need to hire or”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To build cars in China, we just never saw an Apple car. But all the things that they were doing in terms of going in and out of factories and helping on battery technology and stuff, that all happened. That would be a great article for someone else to write. I feel like I'm sort of done with it, so I won't do it. But there's a lot more to say on this whole subject. So going back to one thing you said, I said I don't hold Apple culpable for the early 2000s. It's quite a different dynamic a decade later because when Shizon King comes into power, I have to say, I think on the whole, you'd have to say scholars, but certainly like Westerners writ large, they take several years to understand that Xi Jinping is taking the country in quite an authoritarian direction. And a Chinese scholar would have better take on this. But what I would say is, you know, one of his big campaigns to make China great again, if you will, was to go after corruption. And corruption was a real problem in China. And so that had bipartisan support to use a West.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the best reviews have been able to detect, if you will, the subtext that it hasn't just been that Apple's put themselves in a precarious position. It's that they've put the Western world order in a precarious position. I mean, that really is the sort of unspoken subtext of how influential Apple has been on China's manufacturing sector. I mean, it's difficult to understand the importance of high-end electronics in China. I quote the China scholar Barry Notten saying, this is the most important thing to Xi Jinping. And of course, what you can do with it is amazing. And, you know, electric vehicles are a great example where China is just totally dominant on electric vehicles. And if you think, yeah, but what does that have to do with Apple? Well, what's an EV? It's a smartphone on wheels. It's a lot of the same technology. And I don't go into this in the book. But Apple had a car project for 10 years. And the same model that has produced the iPhone very successfully was deployed.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Military weaponry. I have to say the book doesn't actually handhold you into this thinking, but you'll come away as a pretty good understanding of how that all happens by the time you get through the book. So it's not something I sort of like, it sounds a little more ideological when I talk about it on podcasts, but the book is told in a pretty neutral lens. But I think one of the values of the book is just sort of getting the reader conversant, the importance of the US-China tech battle, and a whole host of things that are in the headlines today. It's maybe not information that you couldn't get. I mean, aside from the specific Apple details somewhere else, but it's probably the most entertaining way of getting there, right? Rather than academic papers and charts about value added manufacturing by country and stuff. It's just a fun way of getting there. So that's really the value of the book.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies or the people or the governments do with those skills once you've taught them. There's no reason why they're confined to supplying your Android competitors. I mean, that sort of, you know, impact one, which is that Apple has built up its own competitors and is now sort of like, you know, suffering at the behest of Xiaomi or Huawei, these companies that not only do they have 55% global market share, but they're increasingly penetrating the top tier, which is really where Apple plays, right? So think of this in car terms. It's one thing proportion to have competitors in volume. It's quite different for them to have competitors that sell $100,000 cars. And most expensive phones in the world today are not iPhones. They're phones from Huawei. So the Chinese are absolutely there. But order of impact number two is that the Chinese now have the capabilities, the production lines, the scale, the engineering to build drones, to build dual use technologies, to build”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the idea, and I hold this in good faith for all the people who held it, was we're going to now do that, the world's most populous country. Apple just had no idea what their impact would be. And the West writ large just didn't see how quickly the Chinese were going to catch up and become a real adversary to not just really America, but the rest of the sort of existing order. And so my argument is that Apple becomes the biggest supporter of what Xi Jinping calls made in China 2025. And this was a decade old plan to sever China's reliance on Western technology for robotics, automation, cutting-edge electronics. And by investing $55 billion a year at a minimum since 2015, this is something that's ongoing today, Apple just had this enormous influence on this country. And of course, what they can't control is what do the”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sorry, I think you would ask this, and I wanted to answer. So, this is kind of the national security blind spot of what Apple had done. And I want to be clear about this because it needs a bit of nuance. I hold zero blame for Apple whatsoever for going to China in the early 2000s. There was basically a bipartisan consensus to such a degree that you could call it the American worldview that investing in other countries and outsourcing and manufacturing was actually like building a peaceful world. And there was lots of evidence for this, right? Think of West Germany, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, each of those countries in their own ways was an authoritarian country in or after World War II. I mean, Taiwan was under martial law for decades, and it was trade. It was commerce that allowed those countries to build a middle class and to absolutely thrive. By the late 1990s, you had people like Thomas Freedman talking about the golden arches theory of diplomacy, that no two countries with McDonald's had ever gone to war with one another.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Car, but get the hell out of here because we're done with Apple for a couple days. We need a breather. So I'm just saying they were just having an enormous impact on the country”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then they're trying to leave, and there's a problem with the car. And I don't remember exactly what it was, but just like for comedic sake, just think like one of the wheels isn't working. So sparks are flying everywhere as this car tries to go. And so the taxi driver basically tells the people at the factory, like, oh, we're not going to be able to leave. And the album people are like, oh, let us stay one more day. And then the taxi driver gets a phone call. He's just absolutely yelled at by this CEO, this supplier, just saying, like, get the Apple people out of here. Like, we don't want them here. And there's something really interesting in that, right? Because even though they're providing amazing training, it's sort of like having a professor who's just really hard on you and asking you to do so many things and you're already exhausted. And so there's this great tension where Apple's providing this great thing, but they're also just really tough teachers to be with. And so basically this car ends up leaving the factory, sparks flying with every turn of the wheel. But basically he's just told, I will pay for the damages of your...”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, thank you. I was just going to point out that the sort of great irony here is that the entire sort of underlay, if that's a word, is to ward off the threat of communism, that effectively there's a big worry that the Soviet ideology, if not the Soviet military, is going to go farther west into Europe. And so America wants to play this great role sort of defending the continent. And so partly it's military, but partly it's just like they didn't want young people inspired by the example of the Soviets. So it was like an idea of like giving them hope. And so the money is actually spent not so much on industry as part of that, but like 50% of the first year is spent on food aid. I mean, Europe is just a devastated continent at this time. And this has been called the most generous act of one country to another in the history of humanity. So, you know, you don't think like a single corporation is going to have that kind of impact, let alone twice that impact in China. So, you know, it's an absolutely wild comparison.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The numbers are absolutely staggering. The other number that is publicly available because Apple puts it in their supplier responsibility document is that the number of people they've trained since 2008 is 28 million, which I point out is larger than the entire labor force of California. So their impact is just absolutely enormous. I have to say there was nothing intuitive about the Marshall Plan as a comparison. It was a multi-step process wherein I thought I must have the math wrong or something, right? Because that just didn't make any sense to me. I mean, the Marshall Plan, if people remember from their high school textbooks, that's America investing. And there are some other countries, if it's largely America, in 16 countries.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need to do. You need to go to China. That wasn't really the case. It was the suppliers themselves were making those calls.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Margin and the highest possible efficiency and so forth. And so all of those companies had already begun moving to Asia in the 80s and the 90s. And China, especially after the country enters the World Trade Organization in 2001, just over and again just becomes the place that can handle the orders. You don't have to fly from one country to another to look at a prototype. You can maybe walk down the street five minutes. Some of these factories are operating 24 hours a day, right? I would talk to Apple engineers who would say, you know, we would realize that we had a problem at two in the morning and you would just have like an army of people there that were willing to go do something to go get it done for you. So if you're looking at spreadsheets to sort of, you know, full circle this conversation, if you're Tim Cook and Cupertino, just looking at the cost and the margin of all the products that you're making on three continents, it just begins to be the case in the early 2000s that China is winning out every time. But it's the suppliers that are making the shift and Apple reacting to that rather than Apple saying, you know,”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a couple things. In a sense, I don't want to give too much credit to Apple. This was just sort of like a macroeconomic change. So sometimes Tim Cook, for instance, is called the architect of the China strategy. I think that's too generous, or if it's not too generous, it's misplaced. I don't mind calling him an admiral because he was like navigating the high seas of macroeconomic changes and figuring out the wins and stuff. So, I mean, I want to give him credit to be clear, but it's not that Apple decided let's put everything in China. It's that the suppliers themselves were in voracious competition with one another to win the orders of Apple and every other company. I mean, the PC is absolutely booming in the late 90s and early 2000s, right? I mean, it is the sexiest product, certainly like in America, you're getting like everyone wants one in their home and then they're upgrading every two or three years or whatever. It's just a massive market. And so if you want to win the orders from Dell, from Compaq from Apple, you need to be offering the lowest possible.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It didn't matter. It would still snap together. And what Johnny and I have introduced is just the total antithesis of that, where the precision required was just absolutely wild. And so what you were learning in terms of building up this production line or using the machines, not just in the final assembly, by the way, that's almost always someone's image, but we're talking about hundreds of factories or dozens of factories at the time, but today hundreds of factories building all this stuff coming up with all this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Kerry Gorgis understood there was a transfer of knowledge on the part of Foxconn by working with Apple. And of course, the really far more interesting narrative is when China begins to realize there's a transfer of knowledge here. And in the same way that Terry Guo thinks, okay, it is great to have you as our partner. Beijing is made to understand later on, oh, it is great to have Apple operations so centralized and consolidated into China.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's not possibly. I mean, first of all, I'm trying to go back to the late 1990s here. So I'm talking about learning the engineering skills and then deploying them on the Dell line or what have you. I mean, yeah, so Terry Guo is the first person to understand that because Apple products are so unique, the sort of second order, third order impact, if you will, of Johnny Ivan Steve Jobs having this visionary appeal of products and so forth, that the impact of that is needing to train people how to actually build this stuff. And so if you're Terry Guo, you're thinking, well, this is unlike any other clients I've thought about. And so there is some ink spilled in the book on things like other computers and indeed Apple computers in the late 1990s before Steve Jobs came back were built in a style that's called Poka Yoke in Japanese. And so it's basically the translation is idiot proof manufacturing.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just fundamentally like tuition free training at the Ivy League equivalent of engineering school to work closely with Apple because they would send America's best engineers to train his workforces. And I've gotten And none of the none of the people at the factory were people that we'd ever met before. And it's because Terry had basically taken the team that we trained up the last few months and just put them on a more lucrative project, right? They would sort of take their skills as if they had graduated from Apple University and they'd move on to Compaq or Dell or whatever. And like a whole new cohort had arrived without any notice to Apple. And it was like a new semester had started for Apple engineers in effect teaching these people.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite literally, the enemy. I mean, this is a civil war that results in the modern creation of Taiwan. So I just want to point that out because it's important for some of the context. Soteriguo understands something really early. And it's not entirely clear to me whether he just sort of has like a mystical sense of perhaps that he's just told, and of course I wasn't in the meeting rooms for Mosa or any, I guess, of these calls. But Perry Guel basically understands that it's not the profits that are enticing when you're working with Apple. In fact, they will negotiate the hell out of you and you often earn maybe 1%, maybe 2% profits. To some extent today, you could say, well, you make up for it in the volumes. But back then, you didn't make it up for the volumes because they were a tiny player. And so the value of working with Apple was the learning. It's because Apple was reconceptualizing so many products and ways of doing things and just, you know, thinking outside the box if you want to use a cliche, just so much that Terry understood it was.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the sort of statistic where if the listener isn't familiar with it, they should really just pause and think and just find me another industry where you've got 20% of the volume and 80% of the profits. And actually, because it's like a narrative, right? I introduced that in 2015, but it's higher today. It's more like 85%. I mean, Apple is just reaping the profits. And the way they're able to do this really stems from a realization of Terry Guo, the founder of Foxconn in 1999. And it's worth knowing, by the way, just because of the geopolitical sort of details in this book that Foxconn is Taiwanese. And so there's this fascinating thing where the governments of Taiwan and Beijing each lay claim to the entire land of China, right? I mean, the official name of Taiwan is the Republic of China versus the People's Republic of China. And so there's this really interesting narrative just about like, why are all these Taiwanese engineers, in a sense, building up a great manufacturing capacity in effect someone that's been there?”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of time to market, which is what most companies think about how do we go from project conceptualization to it being in the hands of consumer. Apple thinks about time to volume, which they internally call time to money. And that's where Foxconn just absolutely excelled. Foxconn could go from zero to making things in at 1 million per day type range, just faster than anybody else. And that's why they become so instrumental to Apple partnership.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“iPod Nano the following year. I mean, it gets to such a level that Saturday Night Live has a Steve Jobs who's introducing iPod after iPod, you know, coming out of his pocket, rendering all previous ones obsolete until he holds up nothing at all and introduces the iPod Invisa. And this was the first time ever in Apple at the time, what, 30-year existence, that they really had penetrated popular culture and really were not a niche company, right? They never had more than like 5% of the PC market when they were doing macs, maybe 10%. They get 80%, 90% when they're doing things like the iPod Mini and the iPod Nano. And so the sort of tension within Apple is, where's the credit for that? Is the credit to Steve Jobs and Johnny I for coming up with these designs or is the credit that we can build these things in the tens of millions? And so yeah, I'm able to introduce figures of speech that I don't think people are familiar with, like time to money, which instead of”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Figuring out in terms of the capabilities of what's available in China and what the factory conditions are like, that sort of translates back into ID so that Johnny Ive realizes I can build anything and we will have a conveyor belt logic system. Like think of Adam Smith's division of labor, the Pin factory, if you've got some economics listeners. And they just divide things into almost like a comedic, if not tragic level where a worker will often be at this conveyor about doing something that takes nine to eleven seconds over and over and over all day for 12 hours with minimal breaks and penalties for laughing. But by doing so, they are able to conjure into existence and at great scale and at minimal cost just anything that comes out of the ID studio. So they're able to completely reconceptualize what a product looks like. And probably the best example of this, if you remember the iPod, I mean, we go from the iPod being popular in 2003 to the iPod mini a year later.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cluster, or maybe a few industrial clusters in China. And so what China is able to offer is not really tech competence. It is availability and abundance of labor, an ability to build factories at scale at something that ends up being called China Speed. I mean, just like an inexplicable quickness in doing things and like 12-hour workdays and such. And so Apple is actually really late to, and I say outsourcing just because I don't have another term for it, right? You could call it the Apple way or something like that, but it's no great term for it. Apple is late to outsource. I mean, companies like HP are in China and in Asia, you know, in the 1980s. Apple's really late to this trend. But whereas everybody else sort of sees this abundance of labor as, oh, we can build at volume and we can build in great quantities. Apple sees unconstrained design potential. So what they realize is that the things that MD and Ops are figured out.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and that's sort of a disastrous chapter for a beautiful computer that if people don't know it, they should really look it up because it looks so alien even today. And that's the iMac G4, sometimes called the Sunflower IMAC, because it was inspired by the sunflowers in the Garden of Loreen Powell Jobs. And Johnny Ive took note of this. And so he wanted a computer that sort of floated towards you where the flower was the monitor. It was the first LCD flat screen monitor computer that Apple made, and all in one. And it's just beautiful, but they have so many supply chain challenges. And effectively, what happens is instead of having prototype after prototype, iteration after iteration done in about six countries from not just Sophie Asia, because it includes mainland China and Japan, but that whole region, basically China is able to build what gets called next door manufacturing, where incentives all the capabilities of all of those suppliers end up just being like a single industrial”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could say the same for Uber. Well, that's what Apple is. They're the largest manufacturer in the world, and they don't have any factories. And a lot of that is manufacturing design and that unit of training everybody. One step below that, by the way, is operations. And that's what Tim Cook leads. So they basically take what MD has done and then they scale the hell out of it and they find second and tertiary suppliers to build resilience in the supply chain. So final point I would say just insofar as if anyone thinks, oh, I'm overstating the role of Tim Cook or whatever. No, I mean, think about who takes over when Steve Jobs passes away. It is the head of operations, and MD is a unit within operations, I should say. So Apple, more than anybody else, understands this. And so when Steve Jobs passes, it is clear as day that the only candidate to take over the day-to-day running of the company is the guy who leads MD and operations, and that's Tim Cook.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Apple really distinguishes itself from every other company, which is to say they don't just find suppliers that are capable of doing something and hope that that company sort of innovates year after year. They send plain loads of America's best engineers to factories across Asia to train them up to install machinery, to audit, to supervise, and to maintain the level of quality that they desperately seek even while the quantities sort of grow by leaps and bounds. And so Apple ends up sort of teaching, you know, to some extent, you could even say babysitting sometimes these suppliers to make sure that they maintain their quality levels. And so the fact that Apple sort of acts as a bank sometimes giving loans to these companies or just owns the machinery within the factories, they sort of develop this manufacturing model that I think is comparable to Airbnb or Uber, right? Airbnb is like the largest hotel company in the world without owning any real estate.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it's this multi year effort where Tim Coke really does have to convince Steve Jobs we can maintain the level of control you desire, but with the nimbleness, the cost effectiveness, the speed of doing it with outsourcing. And so they kind of come up with a new model. And this is like probably the biggest contribution the book makes because I think the missing topography in our understanding of Apple is a unit called manufacturing design. So most people are familiar with industrial design and of course Sir Johnny I, that's the creation, the conception, the field, the look of the product. Production product design rather is one step below and that sort of, you know, how do you make one of these things? What circuit board are we using? What components are we using? How do we get this done? Manufacturing design is the unit that had never really been written about before. And this is the team that basically figures out how do we produce these in quantity? Like how do we build one production line? Where are all the parts coming from? What suppliers are we using, et cetera?”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's such an important move in 1996 when they sell this Fountain Colorado facility. It really just is out of desperation. They need to have the money. There's really no choice about it. In fact, they accept poor terms on the sale just because they need the money. By 2000, they've done a bunch of outsourcing pretty successfully. But Tim Cook really wants to just get rid of all apple manufacturing. He doesn't have the same desire for control, that like maniacal obsessiveness that Steve Jobs had. And Steve Jobs actually made t-shirts for senior staff that said Mactories on it. And this is around 2000. He really wanted to bring the manufacturing back. I mean, that was part of his DNA. When he was at Next Computer, the company that he established during his 12-year exile from Apple, he said about the computer they made, my favorite thing about it is that it wasn't built in Osaka. Osaka is, of course, Japan, because we're sort of back in time a little bit when Japan was the dominant power in electronics rather than China. But he really cared about it.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Final assembly of the supply chain into China. And then later it gets even more Chinese. But I won't skip ahead any further.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To redefine the aesthetics of the computer. We need to build a different operating system that offers things like iTunes and iMovie, and all this sort of comes out of it. But yeah, where I take my narrative is all the things that Tim Cook did to find partners across Asia. And so this is a narrative that, yeah, you holding the book, thinking, oh, God, am I really going to learn anything? I think you probably go page after page after page where you're just realizing that you didn't know because nobody knew that the translucent IMAC was built out of Korea and then in Wales and then in Mexico and that Foxhun sort of seasoned opportunity when that all goes awry and they build them in China but also in Czech Republic and also in California. And so I have what I call this long march to China where there's a seven year narrative between 96 and 2003 where Apple's sort of experimented with contract manufacturers around the world. And it takes quite a while before China just begins to win every contract. And by 2003, they really have consolidated the entire”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tim Cook becomes this foundationally important figure because the things that Steve Jobs wasn't good at and had largely ignored are the things that allowed the PC boom to absolutely overtake Apple such that by 1996, even though Steve Jobs is gone at this point, Apple really is near the brink of bankruptcy, right? It's not that Windows ever really outdid Apple in graphical user interface or being sexy, all the things that Steve Jobs cared about, but they were able to crank the prices lower. They introduced interchangeable parts. And by doing so, the 1981 introduction of the IBM PC becomes the catalyst for what you would call like globalization for the electronic sector. And when Steve Jobs comes back in 1997, he's got this full realization. He just has like, he just feels this, that you are not going to be able to play that game and compete because Apple is just inherently working with 5% of the market globally rather than 95%. You just never going to get the same prices. So what do we need to do?”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“America's greatest adversary. That's sort of the meat of the story. We're going to come to the manufacturing in a moment and we'll come to China, I promise, in a moment as well. But just before we do, give us just a bit more of a sense of Tim Cook himself from the people you interviewed. Because, I mean, kind of one of the moments that stayed with me, Patrick, was I think he spent 13 hours with senior management at one point going through Excel spreadsheets. Yes. Yeah, his very first meeting of Worldwide Managers. This was the meeting that happens every week. It was typically an hour, maybe 90 minutes. And he just immediately, the first day he led the meeting, inculcated a sense of detail and minutiae that essentially nobody had ever experienced.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Narrative that everyone's familiar with is Steve Jobs, like the Hollywood version of Steve Jobs, where he yells at and bullies people, but he does have this dramatic vision and he sort of raises up the capabilities of everybody around him. But we've confined that narrative to like the 12 senior people around him. My narrative basically just takes that idea and transplants it over to Asia and then later on, particularly to China, where that whole ethos, what Steve Jobs called giving a shit, had to be transplanted in an engineering way, but probably more importantly in a cultural way to hundreds of factories across China. And if you understand how effective Apple is at doing that and that they build iPhones at more than 200 million per year involving tens of billions of dollars investments, you can sort of make the mental leap that, oh my God, this company probably just had an enormous impact on the country that in a weird geopolitical turn for the book became”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the morning and sort of upend your whole day and be on the front page. Tim Cook never does that. He's such a restrained individual, right? I compare him to Emmanuel Kant, which is probably more that I've got a religion and philosophy background. But someone that you would time your watch to because his routine on a daily basis was so regular. So I do turn my attention there. I mean, I guess what I would say, and this is really one of the best lines of the book, and I'm saying it because my wife wrote it rather than me. But it's that Johnny Ive and Steve Jobs are responsible for making Apple products unique, but it was the melding of the mines between Tim Cook and Foxton founder Terry Guo that made Apple products ubiquitous. And so I really am trying to tell the story, not of the design and conception of the products, but how do you make them? How do you make them at that quality, at that engineering tolerance? At that cost, basically that margin, and that that quantity. And once you understand that, what you get is this.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To save itself, it does need a radical new vision, doesn't it? And I think this is where your book just turned in a really interestingly different direction from so many other books about Apple. Now, I mean, me and Pat would talk about this beforehand. I mean, I reviewed Patrick's book as well. And I have to say, when I first got it, I was like, how can there be space on the bookshelf for another history of Apple? It's one of the most storied companies, you know, that you can imagine. But where everyone else turns towards Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive and the design, you don't do you. You turn to, I think Bloomberg called in the round peg in the round for the round hole. You turn towards Tim Crook. You know, that's funny. I remember reading a review and I'm thinking, oh God, don't mention that because readers will be turned off because Tim Cook, I think of as competence incarnate, but he's not a very interesting character, right? If you're a journalist, you want to cover a company led by Elon Musk because he might tweet hi at two.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. But Steve Jobs had a certain propensity to put him at the center of events and not to discredit him. He is at the center of events, but probably not maybe as much as the myth would tell you. So it's really in April 1996 that is the worst days for Apple. And they are days away from missing payroll. I believe they have around 13,000 employees at the time. They've got loans coming due. And they're in a total crisis. And they need to sell this fountain Colorado factory that's building MAX to net around $200 million just so that they can meet payball. So it's a pretty dramatic incidence because it just tells you that this company really was in a death spiral. And the previous CEO who only lasted two years, he spent most of his time just trying to find a buyer, right? Apple was almost purchased by Son microsystems. And so, you know, the company that we know and love today really came to the absolute brink of bankruptcy.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You for having me. You set the scene for us in 1996. Tell us what was happening then. Because Apple, who spoiler alert, becomes the world's largest company sometime later, isn't actually at that point the kind of capitalist Leviathan that is bound to be, is it? It's actually in a state of crisis. It's trying to sell its factory off so it can make payroll. Yeah, it's funny. I paint this as a sort of pivotal event and it's funny because it generally doesn't even come up in Apple histories, but that's because we've largely ignored Apple as a manufacturer, which of course it absolutely was from its founding in a garage by two Steve's tinkering with their circuit boards in 1976. And all the way through 2003 when they really closed off their final factories. And so one thing I would say is we tend to think of the worst days at Apple than a deer being in 1997. And that's because Steve Jobs had taken the reins and we've largely followed in his narrative, right? I mean, the best red Apple history ever has to be.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And welcome everyone to this intelligent squared podcast with me, Carmilla. I'm delighted to introduce our guest today, Patrick McGee. Patrick is at the Financial Times. He was the principal Apple reporter there from 2019 to 2023 is the San Francisco correspondent and he's also the author of Apple in China, The Capture of the World's Greatest Company, Patrick. Very warm welcome to you.”
2025-07-29 · Intelligence Squared · Did Apple’s Rise Fuel China’s Fight for Tech Supremacy? With Patrick McGee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT