Making the iPhone in the United States is “not on the horizon,” Tim Cook said during an interview with ABC News Wednesday.
Cook gave the interview while visiting Apple’s Mac Pro factory in Austin, Texas, with President Donald Trump.
“The way I think about it is, the iPhone is made everywhere,” Cook said. “If you look at the glass of the iPhone, which everybody touches all day long, that glass is made in Kentucky. If you were to take apart the iPhone you would see many of the silicon components that are made in the United States as well.”
However, the device itself is “the product of a global supply chain.” Although Cook did not go into more detail, Apple has reportedly asked its manufacturers to explore places outside China to build devices. India, for instance, is one place Apple is building iPhones now.
However, the prospect of moving manufacturing to the U.S. is extremely unlikely. Not only is the manufacturing infrastructure not there, but it would also result in far higher production costs.
Tim Cook: Making iPhones, tariffs, more
Cook touched on the issue of tariffs in his ABS interview. He said that he did not want to “speculate” on how they could hurt Apple. ‘I’m hoping that the US and China come to an agreement, and so I don’t even want to go down that road right now,” Cook said. “I’m so convinced that it’s in the best interest of the US and best interest of China, and so if you have two parties where there’s a common best interest there has got to be some kind of path forward here. And I think that will happen.”
ABC also asked Cook about Apple’s decision to remove an app used by protesters in Hong Kong. “In the specific app in Hong Kong, we made the decision unilaterally,” Cook said. “We made it for safety, and I recognize that somebody can say that is the wrong decision and so forth. We obviously get second-guessed a lot when you make tough decisions on apps to be on versus off. But we made it for safety.”
The other interesting point of discussion concerned Apple’s future. No, Cook didn’t spill all (or any) of Apple’s plans. But he did use some interesting phrasing. “I don’t have my eye on anything big,” Cook said. “I have my eye on a lot of interesting small things.”
Source: ABC News
