Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company

Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I finished this book a couple of weeks ago. It was the first book I completed in 2025 (not the first one I read or started in 2025, just the only one I have finished so far). There was a good reason I stuck with it: it would have been difficult not to.

Great writing. Captivating narrative. One of the most significant business and geopolitical stories of our time. Of course I read it at record speed1.

Apple in China isn’t trying to ascribe blame for where Apple has ended up in its relationship with—and dependence on—China, which is perhaps its greatest strength and its greatest weakness right now. There are no heroes or villains in this story. Well, that’s not quite right—there are several heroes:

In Apple in China , journalist Patrick McGee draws on more than two hundred interviews with former executives and engineers, supplementing their stories with unreported meetings held by Steve Jobs, emails between top executives, and internal memos regarding threats from Chinese competition. The book highlights the unknown characters who were instrumental in Apple’s ascent and who tried to forge a different path, including the Mormon missionary who established the Apple Store in China; the “Gang of Eight” executives tasked with placating Beijing; and an idealistic veteran whose hopes of improving the lives of factory workers were crushed by both Cupertino’s operational demands and Xi Jinping’s war on civil society.

Apple : The book gives a visceral understanding of how the modern Apple — the company, its design aesthetic, its quality obsession and, critically, its culture — came to be. There are so many heroes in this story, from the obvious ones like Jobs and Cook to countless others most of us have never heard of. The wide array of perspectives provides a very different, and what feels like a very real , sense of Apple and Jobs, even more so than, say, Jobs’s biographies.

China : The book provides even greater insight into how China’s manufacturing industry has developed over the decades. I haven’t read much about China beyond what’s in the news, so maybe it’s just my own lack of depth; but I feel like most people are in the same boat. There is so much path dependency in the way that industry has evolved that it now gives me pause when I think about India’s attempts to expand its own manufacturing prowess.

A must-read.

Footnotes

  1. I’m a fairly slow reader, especially when it comes to non-fiction books. ↩