Tim Cook is ending his illustrious tenure as Apple’s chief executive. The soft-spoken operator did the impossible, replacing visionary co-founder Steve Jobs, turning the iPhone from a cultural phenomenon into a financial juggernaut and turning his company into a $4 trillion behemoth — boosting its market value by $682 million. dailyOn average, up to 15 years. By the metrics that investors care about, Mr. Cook is no less than a rock star.
But when one considers his role in spanning American history, his legacy becomes more complex, as much of Apple’s success is due to his move to consolidate nearly all of his company’s manufacturing in China.
The results have been profound. Under Mr. Cook’s leadership, Apple played a key role in the rise of China’s middle class and mass-produced the iPhone at such a low cost that nearly half of all Americans own an iPhone. His choice dramatically enhanced China’s economic position and technological prowess to such an extent that its increasingly authoritarian leaders now see themselves as a powerful rival to the United States.
If President Xi Jinping’s imperialist tendencies pan out, Mr Cook will be remembered for helping bring capitalism and liberalism to one of the world’s most populous countries. If tensions between China and the United States continue to rise, especially if Beijing follows through on its threats to attack the island of Taiwan – a democracy that produces most of the world’s semiconductor chips – Mr Cook will be remembered differently. He would be the man who not only ruined his company’s future (as it is still highly dependent on China), but also ceded the technological power of the West as its biggest threat.
History can be a cruel editor. Consider Jack Welch, the longtime chief executive of General Electric. During his two-decade reign, which ended in 2001, Mr. Welch earned shareholders an astonishing 21 percent annual return – just slightly less than Mr. Cook – and was named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine. His moves in financial engineering were the stuff of Wall Street legend – until the financial crisis exposed the company as hollow and recklessly overblown. By 2009, GE was begging for government-backed cash; Its share price had fallen by 85 percent. In 2022, author David Giles hailed Mr. Welch as “the man who broke capitalism.”
Mr. Cook started at Apple in 1998 as senior vice president of operations and rapidly changed Apple’s manufacturing strategy to rely on cheap labor overseas. By owning the process rather than owning the factories, Apple can maintain control over production while shifting the manufacturing risks to suppliers. Mr. Cook also stripped royalties from app makers and moved into media streaming and advertising, all part of promoting “services” that were twice as profitable as the hardware Apple sold.
Year after year, Mr. Cook has removed subtle risks from Apple’s business and made its financial position smoother and more predictable. But at the same time, he proved ignorant of macrorisks, moving most of Apple’s operations to China just as the authoritarian country was turning into America’s staunchest rival.
Based on my research, I am convinced that no company has done more to enable President Xi. since 2008, Apple has worked With suppliers to train 30 million workers, mainly in China. It has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the mainland and facilitated the epic transfer of practical knowledge of making things to hundreds of Chinese factories. I write in my book that at two points, Apple’s Cupertino, California, headquarters was sending so many engineers to streamline production that it convinced United Airlines to fly three times a week from San Francisco to Chengdu and Hangzhou, reasoning that it would buy so many first class seats that the route would be profitable even if the rest of the plane was empty.
The cost of doing business in China was turning a blind eye to its growing authoritarian impulses. Apple has removed thousands of apps from its Chinese App Store on Beijing’s instructions. It transferred mainland Chinese users’ iCloud data to a server run by a state-owned company, potentially exposing their personal data to the government. (Apple says it is following China’s laws.)
Mr. Cook has spoken out in favor of voting rights, the environment, gun control and LGBTQ safety, but he has been conspicuously silent on China’s subjugation of Hong Kong protesters, the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang or the 20-year sentence of pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai. Most revealingly, since taking over as Apple CEO he has not set foot in Taiwan – a thriving democracy, but rather a rogue province from Beijing’s perspective. That the head of the world’s most prestigious technology company won’t visit its most important chip suppliers is telling.
Apple is hardly alone in this. Many American companies, in the race for low prices, have effectively given a large portion of their practical knowledge, machinery, processes, and talent to China. They gave President Xi the resources needed to achieve dominance in sectors as diverse as rare-earth magnets, solar wafers, steel, and pharmaceuticals. The billions of dollars China is pouring into manufacturing electric cars could single-handedly leave Detroit in its dust.
China is manufacturing more than the country needs or importers want. When Western economists criticize the resulting oversupply as inefficient, they miss the point. China’s goal is not to provide returns to shareholders. This is to control the material production of the world by controlling it. as economist Noah Smith saw“Profit is not the goal of war.”
China’s share of global industrial output soars, despite efforts by the Biden and Trump administrations to slow the country’s pace expected to increase 45 percent by 2030, up from about 30 percent in 2025. And Beijing has imposed new rules to punish foreign companies that take action to divest from China.
Apple, for its part, has taken tentative steps to expand iPhone assembly in India, but the bulk of its supply chain is still deeply rooted in China.
Mr Cook’s successor, John Ternes, is relatively young, capable and ambitious. There is reason to hope that he may reconsider and forget some of Mr. Cook’s original notions. But Mr. Cook is not retiring; he is stepping up Above To the Executive Chairman. And Mr Turnas may not be able to chart a new course if the architect of the current strategy sits above him.
Of course, no businessman can ever truly know the historical consequences of his actions. Cambridge historian Christopher Clark argued that the disaster of the First World War resulted from the aggregation of rational, defensive decisions made by politicians in a complex world. Mr. Cook’s decision to consolidate Apple’s operations in China fits that mold: Every decision to deepen its footprint in the country made sense at the time.
Those decisions also brought huge sums of money to Apple and its investors. But stock prices do not reflect the cost of our economy and our own destroyed industries.
Patrick McGee covered Apple for six years for the Financial Times and is the author of “Apple in China.” He is now a features writer for the Financial Times and a columnist for the Free Press.
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