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The first major history of Apple in the 21st century—from near-bankruptcy to world's largest company.
Apple in China is the untold story of how the tech giant tied its fortunes to America's biggest rival, transforming both company and country.
“This is the best book about Apple ever written, one of the best books about China ever written, and one of the best books about tech, period.” —Ben Thompson, Stratechery
Investigative journalist Patrick McGee draws on 200+ interviews with former Apple executives and engineers to reveal how Cupertino’s choice to anchor its supply chain in China has increasingly made it vulnerable to the regime’s whims.
Both an insider’s historical account and a cautionary tale, Apple in China is the first history of Apple to go beyond the biographies of its top executives and set the iPhone’s global domination within an increasingly fraught geopolitical context. It's being translated into 10+ languages.
A journalist with the Financial Times since 2013, Patrick has reported from Hong Kong, Germany, and California. His writing has appeared in the Times of London, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Irish Times and The Toronto Star.
He led the FT’s Apple coverage from 2019 to 2023 and won a San Francisco Press Club Award for his deep dive into Apple’s HR problems.
Previously, he was a bond reporter at The Wall Street Journal in New York. He has a Master’s in global diplomacy from SOAS, University of London, and a degree in religious studies from the University of Toronto. Originally from Calgary, Canada, he resides in the Bay Area.
For readers of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs and Chris Miller’s Chip War, a riveting look at how Apple helped build China’s dominance in electronics assembly and manufacturing only to find itself trapped in a relationship with an authoritarian state making ever-increasing demands.
Apple isn’t just a brand; it’s the world’s most valuable company and creator of the twenty-first century’s defining product. The iPhone has revolutionized the way we live, work and connect. But Apple is now a victim of its own success, caught in the middle of a new Cold War between two superpowers.
On the brink of bankruptcy in 1996, Apple launched a new strategy to outsource its manufacturing. After experimenting in eight countries, nearly all of its operations were lured to China by the promises of affordable, ubiquitous labour. As the iPod and iPhone transformed Apple's fortunes, their sophisticated production played a seminal role financing, training, supervising, and supplying Chinese manufacturers—skills Beijing is now weaponizing against the West.
Apple in China is the sometimes disturbing and always revelatory story of how an outspoken, proud company that once praised “rebels” and “troublemakers”—the company that encouraged us all to “Think Different”—devolved into a silent, passive partner to a belligerent regime that increasingly controls its fate.
“Apple in China reveals the depth of the tech giant’s entanglement with the Chinese state and examines the moral and political tradeoffs made along the way. With rich reporting and geopolitical relevance, it has enduring impact. Overall, it shows how sharp writing and a clear narrative can turn deep reporting into a compelling page-turner. You learn more about Apple reading this book than from any newspaper article or documentary out there.”
- SABEW, announcing winner of its 2025 Best in Business Book Awards.
Essay in The New York Times (May 2025)
Can Tim Cook Save Apple from Being Crushed by Trump? Read the essay
Essay in The Free Press (May 2025)
China and America Agree: Apple Is Too Big to Fail Read the essay
The Commonwealth Club (May 2025)
On May 27 I was joined by John Ford, former general manager of Apple retail in China, for a talk.
Essay in UnHerd (August 2025)
Time is Running out for Tim Cook Read the essay
"…as Patrick McGee makes devastatingly clear in his smart and comprehensive "Apple in China," the American company's decision under Tim Cook, the current C.E.O., to manufacture about 90 percent of its products in China has created an existential vulnerability not just for Apple, but for the United States — nurturing the conditions for Chinese technology to outpace American innovation.
McGee, who was the lead Apple reporter for The Financial Times and previously covered Asian markets from Hong Kong, takes what we instinctively know — "how Apple used China as a base from which to become the world's most valuable company, and in doing so, bound its future inextricably to a ruthless authoritarian state" — and comes up with a startling conclusion, backed by meticulous reporting: "that China wouldn't be China today without Apple."
—Hannah Beech, The New York Times
"Groundbreaking ... The book is jaw dropping. It's so well-researched. It's not a polemic. It's not hyperbole.” — Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
"Scrupulously reported." — The New Yorker
”Fascinating … McGee argues that Apple’s choices have not only created risks for the company’s future growth; they have also directly enabled the rise of China as the United States’ only peer technological competitor.” — Elizabeth Economy, Foreign Affairs
"Eye-opening and disturbing … It is a cautionary tale par excellence, one that Elon Musk's Tesla is only now learning the hard way.” — Martin Laflamme, Los Angeles Review of Books
"A fascinating analysis of how global capitalism conquered China—and vice versa." —Publishers' Weekly
"McGee tells the tale of this Faustian bargain in bold, vivid strokes. It's a great read and an informative guide to how Apple and China truly operate—one that global leaders (and Silicon Valley bigwigs) should pay heed to … He manages to turn supply chain decisions into high drama and make injection molding seem sexy.” — Bob Davis, Foreign Policy
"A gripping reportorial narrative [which] will change the way you look at any piece of Apple equipment from now on. Or the way you read any story about tariffs, "decoupling," and US-Chinese economics dealings overall … the best on-scene detailed case-study of how the US and Chinese are intertwined." — James Fallows, Breaking the News
"Revealing…Apple in China corrects an imbalance in the vast library of Apple analysis. By detailing the inherently symbiotic rise of Apple and China’s remarkable manufacturing capability, it exposes a fundamental misunderstanding in the US–China trade wars. — Michael Gill, Inside Story
"An eye-opening exposé … chronicles a lucrative relationship stained by manipulation, violence and abuse . . . Apple in China is astonishing." — Tom Knowles, The Telegraph
"One of the best books about Apple anyone has ever written." — John Gruber, Daring Fireball
"The gripping tale of how the computer giant's decades-long investment in China fueled its spectacular success and, in turn, accelerated China's rise as a technology superpower." — Alex Tapscott, The New York Post
"Remarkable" — John Turley-Ewart, The Globe & Mail
"Reading Apple in China, it's hard not to wonder whether Apple, in its pursuit of profit, may have inadvertently helped usher in a new world order helmed by one of America's biggest adversaries." — Greg Rosalsky, NPR's Planet Money
"McGee depicts Cook as a leader who unwittingly led Apple right to the center of a geopolitical quagmire by conceding to the Chinese government, right at the very moment he should have been executing a backup plan." — Issie Lapowsky, Vanity Fair
"A riveting account" — Robyn Mak, Reuters BreakingViews
"His timely book poses a question for investors and policymakers alike: can the company thrive without China? If the answer is no, then a failure to end the trade war will bruise Apple even more deeply than the global economy." — The Economist
“This book is totemic … We all know that manufacturing, logistics and supply chains are important. McGee has managed to make them thrilling as well.” — Carl Miller, Literary Review
“Incredibly timely… [McGee] has used [his] background to create a really comprehensive history telling a story that very few people truly understand.”
—Peter Kafka, Vox “Channels”
"A remarkably researched and detailed story of the tech giant's rapid rise to global dominance." — Terence Corcoran, The Financial Post
“Makes the provocative argument that Apple has not simply benefited from cheap Chinese labor, as widely assumed, but that it has also played an indispensable role in making China the tech superpower it is today.” — Kainoa Lowman,The American Prospect
"A well-argued, eye-opening look at the dark side of globalism, and those who win and lose because of it." — Kirkus Reviews
Early Praise:
“Absolutely riveting. An extraordinary story, expertly told—and one that has important implications for Apple, for tech, and for global geoeconomics.”
—Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford and bestselling author of The Silk Roads
"Apple is more than the world's greatest company. It is integral to the whole culture of globalization. Patrick McGee not only narrates the epic history of Apple, but explains how, in effect, it got taken over by China, the world's greatest illiberal power. To call this book a page-turner is almost to diminish its importance. It is a once-in-a-generation read."
—Robert D. Kaplan, author of the New York Times bestseller The Revenge of Geography and the forthcoming Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis; Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute
“A tour-de-force account of how the world's most influential company empowered the inexorable rise of the regime that now shapes its—and our—future. Paced like a thriller and spanning the years from before Steve Jobs's fateful decision to outsource production to more recent times which shine a fresh spotlight on Tim Cook’s careful wooing of Donald Trump, Apple in China captures every twist and turn of the tech giant’s off-kilter and decidedly off-script relationship with the authoritarian state. What will surprise many is how China ensnared a corporate titan by matching and then surpassing its knack for ruthless efficiency and global dominance.”
—Megan Murphy, former Editor in Chief of Bloomberg BusinessWeek
"Deeply researched, disturbing, and enlightening, Apple in China reveals how Apple enabled China's rise, seemingly at the cost of its own future. In these pages we watch as the world's most profitable company gets outmaneuvered by the world's most powerful dictator. Using an impressively broad palette, McGee paints a picture of Apple CEO Tim Cook resolutely trying to save costs by placing nearly all of the company's advanced manufacturing base in Beijing's grip, only to find it impossible to wriggle free."
—Chris Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Chip War
"There is little doubt that Big Tech companies—like the world's richest and most influential one, Apple—wield as much power as many nation states. But what's less well known is how these companies are themselves manipulated by the Chinese state for its own economic and political ends. In this hugely important new book, Patrick McGee shows us how Apple's quest for wealth and power in China may in the end be the undoing both of the company and of America's quest for technology supremacy."
—Rana Foroohar, Financial Times Global Business Columnist, CNN Global Economic Analyst, and author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
“A masterful and deeply reported portrayal of how Apple gained China and lost its soul.”
—Isaac Stone Fish, author of America Second and CEO of Strategy Risks
"A masterpiece of investigative journalism, replete with revelations. Every iPhone owner will want to read this book, but no Apple employee will risk being seen with it. McGee shows how China played the long game, convincing Apple to invest on an unprecedented scale and, inadvertently, help build its grand authoritarian project. This book is a warning for anyone eager to do business in hostile countries."
—Geoffrey Cain, author of Samsung Rising and The Perfect Police State, and a former sanctions investigator for the US Congress
Praise for Patrick's reporting in
The Financial Times:
“Utterly fascinating … The theory that a significant part of the explanatory burden for China's world-historical supremacy in electronics manufacturing is shouldered personally by Tim Cook is interesting, to say the least.”—Benjamin Braun, political economist at Max-Planck Institute
“If you would like to understand how Apple built its historic supply chain—with Foxconn's help, of course—and ramped it up until it was almost entirely inseparable from China, this @PatrickMcGee_ series has you covered.”—Brian Merchant, author of The One Device: A Secret History of the iPhone
“The @FT goes deep on Apple & China. @PatrickMcGee_ explains how Apple transcends outsourcing, by providing machinery and engineering know-how. Basically, it turns suppliers into something like subsidiaries that carry all the risk.”—Tripp Mickle, author of After Steve, How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul.
“A must-read for understanding not just the future of Apple's supply chain but also of the dynamics at play with accelerating deglobalization.” —Eric Seufert, founder of Heracles Capital
“Excellent long-read from @PatrickMcGee_ on how tricky it will be for Apple to disentangle from China, and by extension US manufacturing in general.”—James Crabtree, executive director at IISS Asia
“Excellent piece demonstrating the complexity of supply chains and difficulty of moving them out of China. The focus is Apple, but the insights apply to others.” —Scott Kennedy, senior adviser, Center for Strategic and International Studies
“Fantastic piece on how #Apple built and invested in the #SupplyChains in China. People who think Chinese supply chain can be dismantled easily and moved don’t understand the complexity and exit barrier.”—Shailesh Ghorpade, venture capitalist
“This fascinating piece on how Apple made itself dependent on vast & complex production facilities in China underlines how foolish all the 1990s-2000s chatter about a ‘weightless’ economy & ‘living on thin air’ was. The iPhone, epitome of globalisation, emerges from China, which ‘offers … an entire ecosystem of processes, built over many years’.”—Alex Callinicos, Emeritus Professor of European Studies, King's College London
“Fascinating read on Apple and China. A reminder that governments don't trade, businesses do. A question as to whether any other country than China could have delivered for [Apple]. Also how many consumers have benefitted from this. Modern trade is complex."—David Henig, UK director of the European Centre For International Political Economy
“Fascinating FT piece on Apple and China. Looking back, the age of high globalization might well be called the age of Apple.”—John Cassidy, The New Yorker
Connect with Patrick McGee
Media requests: Paul Samuelson, director of publicity, Scribner.
Speaking engagements: Worldwide Speakers Group
Literary representation: Toby Mundy, Aevitas Creative Management.
Download the End Notes for Apple in China — PDF
Headshot: © Cayce Clifford