So Tim Cook went on TV this week and said Apple's going to start making some Macs in America again. It was all over the place Thursday — the Bloomberg Businessweek cover story, then that same evening he sat down with Brian Williams on Rock Center, looking about as comfortable in a TV interview as I am at a dentist appointment. Which, fine, nobody expects the guy to be a natural on camera. Steve wasn't exactly warm either, he was just good at pretending the whole thing was a magic trick.
The number everyone's repeating is $100 million. That's what Apple says it'll spend in 2013 to move production of one of its existing Mac lines back to the US, working with a manufacturing partner rather than building some giant new Apple-branded factory in Ohio like a few headlines made it sound. Nobody's said which line yet. My guess is the Mac mini or maybe the Mac Pro, since neither one ships in the crazy volumes the MacBook Air does, and lower volume is a lot easier to pull off domestically without your supply chain having a nervous breakdown.
Here's the thing that's bugging me though, and I don't think I'm being a cynic about it. A hundred million dollars sounds like real money right up until you remember Apple posted something like $8.2 billion in profit for a single quarter back in October. Not revenue. Profit. So this announcement, as nice as it is, is Apple spending roughly what it makes in profit over about four hours of a normal quarter. I'm not saying dont do it. I actually think it's a fine thing to do, moving even one product line stateside creates real jobs and that matters to actual people. Im just tired of watching this get covered like its some enormous strategic pivot when its closer to a rounding error with a press release attached.
And the "Made in USA" framing is going to run into a wall the second people look at the actual sticker on the box. Every Mac I've ever owned says "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China" on the back, and that's not changing for the other 90-something percent of what they sell. Final assembly of a couple products isn't the same as the components inside them being American-made either — plenty of the screens, chips, and glass in this stuff comes from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, all over. So even the Mac line that does move here is going to be full of parts that flew in from somewhere else first. I dont say that to be a downer about it, I just think its worth being honest that "assembled in America" and "made in America" are two pretty different claims and this week a lot of coverage blurred them into one.
Little side thing that has nothing to do with any of this: my MacBook Pro's fan has started making this faint clicking noise whenever it spins up past a certain speed, like a playing card in bike spokes but way quieter and way more annoying because you only notice it in a silent room at 11pm when youre trying to finish a blog post. Ive had this laptop fourteen months. I looked it up and apparently its a somewhat known issue with dust getting into the fan housing on this generation, and the fix is either canned air or taking the bottom panel off, which I am absolutely not doing to a computer thats still under warranty. So thats an appointment at the Apple Store I get to make now, probably next week given how backed up they always are in December.
Anyway. I dont think this manufacturing story is nothing, and I dont think its everything either, which apparently makes me the boring middle-ground guy on this one compared to the "Apple saves American manufacturing!" crowd and the "its all PR, ignore it" crowd who are both yelling on Twitter right now. A hundred million dollars and one product line is a real, small, specific thing. Id rather cover it as that than pretend its bigger just because the announcement had good lighting and a Bloomberg cover behind it.
Going to go put my laptop somewhere with better airflow and see if the clicking calms down before I have to actually deal with it properly.