“Apple Inc plans to move some production of Macintosh computers to the United States from China next year, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in remarks published on Thursday, in what could be a important test of the nascent comeback in U.S. electronics manufacturing,” Edwin Chan and Nicola Leske report for Reuters.
“Cook did not say which Macintosh products will be produced in the United States,” Chan and Leske report. “But the effort is expected to go well beyond simple final assembly of devices, with Apple and unnamed partners building most or all of the components in the United States as well.”
Chan and Leske report, “The company will spend more than $100 million on the U.S. manufacturing initiative, Cook said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, published on Thursday. ‘This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people and we’ll be investing our money,’ Cook said. He told NBC’s ‘Rock Center’ program, in an interview to be aired later Thursday, that only one of the existing Mac product lines would be manufactured exclusively in the United States.”
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote yesterday: 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.”
Chan and Leske report, “Cross Research analyst Shannon Cross said it made sense for Apple to bring some manufacturing back to the United States, because some components were already being produced there… Cross pointed to other potential benefits of U.S. manufacturing, including mitigating the risk of intellectual property theft… Beyond the marketing boost, some analysts said Apple could blaze a trail should it prove that American manufacturing of electronics can be profitable. ‘It seems to me like a nice time for Apple to do something,’ Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said. ‘If it can be a profitable business, and others follow, then Apple has shown the way.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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