Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company
Smart and comprehensive ... McGe...comes up with a startling conclusion, backed by meticulous reporting ... McGee has a journalist’s knack for developing scenes with a few curated details ... Sometimes, McGee is too comprehensive. He draws interesting portraits of characters who disappear after a few paragraphs. We do not need to know the full name of the law firm that Apple hired in preparation for a possible bankruptcy in the mid-1990s or even the minutiae of pre-China personnel wrangles, especially when centuries of Chinese history are compressed to less than a page. There are a few Chinese misspellings and miscues—the surname Wang is not, in fact, pronounced quite as 'Wong.' And it would have been nice to have gotten more perspectives of Chinese people ... But these are quibbles with an otherwise persuasive exposé .
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Apple in China is an occasionally dry industrial and corporate history, but it is also an insightful account of how a powerful company might be 'captured' by the lucrative temptations of the ultimate labor and consumer market. Some of the book’s best sections chronicle the tangled relationships of Chinese entrepreneurs—from gray-market iPhone resellers to founders of large manufacturing concerns—with a giant American company that was content to follow the political winds, wherever they might blow ... The book may underplay the role of China’s own state industrial policy in its now massive tech sector.
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Eye-opening ... McGee... breaks down in much greater detail the relationship between this capitalist company and communist nation ... Apple is notoriously secretive, but McGee proffers dozens of first-hand accounts of how the company essentially bumbled its way into becoming hooked on China ... McGee gives Apple, to my mind, too easy a ride over how it has largely decided to ignore the terrible working conditions in Chinese factories in favour of getting its products made as quickly and cheaply as possible. There is, as well, too much detail on some of the smaller characters who helped build up Apple’s manufacturing power. But as an insight into how this odd couple became so entwined—in Apple’s manufacturing and engineering processes, design secrets, business partnerships and a large chunk of its sales—Apple in China is astonishing.
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