Apple moving some manufacturing to the U.S.

Apple CEO Tim Cook tells interviewers the company will invest $100 million in Mac manufacturing line

By Bob Vavra, Content Manager, Plant Engineering

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Call it another sign of manufacturing jobs reshoring, a response to criticism or simply a way to more effectively distribute its operations closer to its customers. However you look at it, Apple is bringing some of its manufacturing operations to the United States.

In two interviews this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the world’s largest company by market value would spend about $100 million on U.S. manufacturing operations in 2013. In an interview with Businessweek, Cook said, “Next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac. We’ve been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it. It will happen in 2013. We’re really proud of it. We could have quickly maybe done just assembly, but it’s broader because we wanted to do something more substantial. So we’ll literally invest over $100 million. This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money.”

He noted in the Businessweek interview that parts of the iPhone and iPad already are manufactured in the U.S.  

The overwhelming majority of Apple products, including iPhones and iPads, are manufactured outside of the U.S. The company has faced criticism for issues of worker safety and working conditions at its contractor’s Foxconn plants in China in recent years.

In an interview for broadcast Thursday, Dec. 6 on NBC’s Rock Center, Cook said the Mac line manufacturing would be exclusively done in the U.S. “We’ve been working for years on doing more and more in the United States,” Cook told NBC’s Brian Williams in the interview.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-06/tim-cooks-freshman-year-the-apple-ceo-speaks

http://rockcenter.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/06/15708290-apple-ceo-tim-cook-announces-plans-to-manufacture-mac-computers-in-usa