“In an exclusive interview with Brian Williams airing tonight at 10pm/9c on NBC’s ‘Rock Center,’ Apple CEO Tim Cook announced one of the existing Mac lines will be manufactured exclusively in the United States next year,” Ronnie Polidoro reports for NBC News. “‘We’ve been working for years on doing more and more in the United States,’ Cook told Williams. It was Cook’s first interview since taking over from his visionary former boss, Steve Jobs, who resigned due to health reasons in August 2011. Jobs died on October 5, 2011, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.”
“Cook, who joined Apple in 1998, said he believes it’s important to bring more jobs to the United States. Apple would not reveal where exactly the Macs will be manufactured,” Polidoro reports. “‘When you back up and look at Apple’s effect on job creation in the United States, we estimate that we’ve created more than 600,000 jobs now,’ said Cook. Those jobs, not all Apple hires, vary from research and development jobs in California to retail store hires to third-party app developers.”
MacDailyNews Note: Set your DVRs: Brian Williams’ full interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook airs tonight, December 6th at 10pm Eastern on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams.
“Given that, why doesn’t Apple leave China entirely and manufacture everything in the U.S.? ‘It’s not so much about price, it’s about the skills,’ Cook told Williams,” Polidoro reports. “Echoing a theme stated by many other companies, Cook said he believes the U.S. education system is failing to produce enough people with the skills needed for modern manufacturing processes. He added, however, that he hopes the new Mac project will help spur others to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. ‘The consumer electronics world was really never here,’ Cook said. ‘It’s a matter of starting it here.'”
Polidoro reports, “What’s next for Apple? Did Cook leave us with a clue? ‘When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years,’ Cook told Williams. ‘It’s an area of intense interest. I can’t say more than that.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Next-gen Mac Pro? With the line’s smaller production volume requirements, it’d be a good candidate and, this past June, Tim Cook stated that Apple is working on professional Mac for “later next year.”
Related article:
Tim Cook: Apple is working on professional Mac for ‘later next year’ – June 12, 2012
