I just finished reading Patrick McGee’s book on Apple and here are my insights:
1. Vulnerability by Design – Apple made itself vulnerable by design. By instructing Chinese suppliers how to manufacture world‑class iPhones (from micrometer tolerances to assembly-line choreography) Apple inadvertently built also China’s industrial power. McGee quotes internal docs revealing Apple spent ~$275 billion over five years, like “a Marshall Plan for China” . The result? Suppliers learned Apple’s secrets and then used them against Apple.
2. “Teach‑a‑Man‑to‑Fish” syndrome
The book recounts Apple’s “manufacturing design engineers” who embedded themselves inside factories to innovate processes side‑by‑side with Chinese counterparts . It’s like teaching someone to sail and then racing against them across the Pacific. Now Apple watches as domestic Chinese brands leverage those same skills to launch better hardware at lower price points. The irony: Apple’s brilliance became the upstream fueling its own competition.
3. Rules Bent, Rules Broken
Under Tim Cook, Apple flouted its own conservative playbook. Stewardship of the supply chain? Check. Censorship concessions in China? Check. Massive financial bets in one country? Check. Cook prioritized growth and risk‑mitigation via complexity, not isolation. But this roadmap left Apple exposed to Beijing’s whims: data regulation, app‑store censorship, strategic factory inspections, all executed with no way to retaliate. In essence, Apple promised trust and delivered dependence.
4. Lost the AI race
Apple’s AI stumble is now a textbook. It hyped “Apple Intelligence,” only to fall behind companies like OpenAI, Google and now even Chinese firms . The result? It must now partner or buy (perhaps a Hugging Face, Anthropic, or equivalent) to plug the AI gap. And, guessing by history, Apple will ship on cohesion, not innovation.
5. Tim Cook’s legacy? A Jack Welch‑ish reminder
Cook’s tenure reads like Jack Welch’s GE (ie. financial wizardry and operational discipline) until the long‑term reckoning. Short-term wins: unprecedented profits, market cap soaring, flawless supply execution. Mid‑term consequences: China‑dominated manufacturing, weakened autonomy, and a creeping inability to set its own terms. In the long game? That Welch playbook can calcify, leaving the firm strong on metrics, brittle on innovation and resilience.
Concluding
Apple wrote a supply‑chain symphony for China. It taught the world how to make iPhones, only to watch others remix and outperform. It broke its own “one‑country” rule under Cook, and blinded itself to the strategic cost. With AI lagging, the only play left is M&A or alliances and that dilutes Apple’s secret sauce. In the short term, Cook looks like a hero. In the long run? He may be judged like Welch: great at squeezing value, but sowing vulnerabilities that crunch after he’s gone.
