So Tim Cook did this interview with Brian Williams that aired on NBC's Rock Center last night, and by this morning it was everywhere on the tech sites. Bloomberg Businessweek ran a companion piece too, since apparently one interview isnt enough exposure for one announcement. The line everyone's repeating: Apple is going to spend $100 million next year to build "one line of Macs" in the United States.
That's it, that's the whole announcement. One line. Doesnt say which Mac. Doesnt say where in the US, though people are already guessing Texas because some components already get made there. Cook didnt say a factory, he didnt give a jobs number, he just said "one line" and let everybody fill in the rest with whatever they wanted it to mean.
And a lot of people are filling it in with a lot. Ive seen at least three posts today acting like this is the start of manufacturing coming back to America wholesale, like Foxconn is going to shut down a building in Shenzhen and ship the machines to Fort Worth. That's not what got announced. One hundred million dollars sounds like real money until you remember Apple made about that much in profit every day and a half last quarter. This isnt a company betting the farm on domestic assembly. This is a company doing a small, calculated thing and getting a Brian Williams segment out of it.
I dont say that to be cynical for its own sake, I actually think its a fine thing for them to do. More manufacturing here is good, obviously, and if this is the toe in the water that leads to more, great. My uncle worked an assembly line in Ohio for almost twenty years before that plant closed in the late 90s and moved to Mexico, so Im not exactly rooting against factory jobs coming back. I just dont think one product line is the headline its being treated as this morning.
Nobody's said which Mac it is either, and that detail is bugging me more than it probably should. Is it the Mini? The Mac Pro, which hasnt been meaningfully updated in years and could use the press? My money's on the Pro, mostly because its the low-volume one, the one where "assembled in the US" as a badge matters more than shaving pennies off a bill of materials that ships in the millions. But that's a guess, same as everyone else's guess.
Worth remembering that basically nothing Apple sells right now is made here. My iMac's got a sticker on the box that says assembled in China, same as my phone, same as pretty much every other machine currently on my desk. That's not a knock on Apple specifically, its the whole industry, and it's been that way since long before Cook had the job. Dell, HP, Lenovo, all running through the same handful of contract manufacturers. Part of why this is getting so much attention is exactly that gap: it's a genuinely small move against a genuinely enormous status quo, and headlines dont do nuance well at 7am.
I'll be curious what actually shows up when this "one line" finally exists sometime next year. If its a low-volume product nobody was buying anyway, this quietly disappears from the narrative the way these things usually do. If its something people actually want, it'll get held up as proof of a trend that one factory line doesnt really prove on its own. Either way Id bet we hear "Made in USA" in an Apple keynote before we hear the word "Foxconn" again, even though Foxconn is presumably still building the rest of the lineup same as always.
Anyway, first real cold snap of the season here today, and Im writing this instead of dealing with a space heater that's making a noise I dont like. More on that if it catches fire, I guess.