China is the biggest hub for manufacturing Apple’s products, and Apple took some extraordinary measures over the years to get there.
At its peak, Apple was flying so many engineers to China for supply chain work that it convinced United Airlines to launch an entirely new long-haul route — not once, but twice. The story, detailed in Patrick McGee’s 2025 book Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, is one of the more vivid illustrations of just how deeply Apple embedded itself in China’s manufacturing ecosystem.
The United Airlines Deal
Before Apple set up permanent R&D hubs in China, it was sending engineers to the country on a near-constant basis. The volume of travel became so significant that Apple approached United Airlines with an unusual proposition: launch a direct flight from San Francisco to Chengdu, three times a week. The pitch was straightforward — Apple would reliably fill enough of the thirty-six first-class seats to make the route profitable. United agreed. The result was a 6,857-mile nonstop route that became the airline’s longest nonstop flight at the time.
Two years later, Apple came back with a second ask. This time, United launched a nonstop route to Hangzhou — a tech hub on the outskirts of Shanghai — also at Apple’s request.
Apple’s commitment to flying its people to China wasn’t just about temporary project work, either. A leaked United Airlines promotional banner revealed the full scale of it: Apple was spending roughly $150 million a year on United flights, booking an average of 50 business-class seats daily on the San Francisco–Shanghai route alone — representing a quarter of its total annual spend with the airline.
Why China, Specifically
The answer, as Tim Cook himself explained, was never primarily about cheap labor. In a widely-cited interview, Cook pushed back on that framing directly: “China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago.” What kept Apple anchored to China was something harder to replicate — a deep, concentrated pool of specialized manufacturing skill. Cook’s analogy was blunt: you could hold a meeting of tooling engineers in the US and barely fill a road, while in China you could fill multiple football fields.
That vocational depth was the foundation Apple built on. Each of its China hubs served a specific function. The Beijing lab focused on software — including wireless payment technology and ensuring iOS worked well for Chinese users, including a Mandarin-speaking Siri. The Shanghai hub concentrated on hardware, running a battery testing operation. The Shenzhen hub was closest to the supply chain itself; Apple engineers working there spent so much time inside suppliers’ factories that visiting engineers from Cupertino would sometimes arrive to find the lab itself nearly empty.
The Internal Politics
Not everyone at Apple was comfortable with the scale of China’s growing influence. According to McGee’s book, supporters of the R&D hubs in China argued that the pushback from Cupertino engineers reflected anxiety over losing decision-making authority — that as more work got done in China, power was shifting eastward within the company. The hubs were, in part, a more permanent solution to a dynamic that had been building for years: Apple’s presence in China had grown so large and so operationally essential that temporary trips were no longer sufficient.
The Costs of Dependence
The airline arrangements were just one visible symptom of a deeper structural reality. McGee’s book argues that Apple didn’t just move its supply chain to China — it effectively helped build China’s electronics manufacturing industry, sending thousands of engineers across the Pacific, training millions of workers, and investing hundreds of billions into Chinese suppliers. Between 2016 and 2021, Apple reportedly invested $275 billion in upgrading its Chinese supply chain — more than five times what the U.S. CHIPS Act authorized for American semiconductor manufacturing.
That depth of entanglement is precisely what makes Apple’s current situation so complicated. As geopolitical tensions have mounted and tariffs have reshaped the trade landscape, Apple has been working to diversify — moving more iPhone production to India and Vietnam. Tim Cook confirmed on an earnings call that by mid-2025, the majority of iPhones sold in the US would be assembled in India. But the machinery, tooling knowledge, and engineering expertise that makes China’s factories so efficient took decades to build. That’s not easily relocated.
The United Airlines flight was, in retrospect, an early sign of what was coming — a company so committed to its China strategy that it was willing to reshape international aviation around it.