Part of the American dream is to have more manufacturing companies back in the US. However, the truth of the matter is even US companies prefer manufacturing in China. Tim Cook, the current chief executive officer of Apple Inc., says China is preferred because of the quantity of skills in one location.

One of the things that has come out a lot about China is that they sell things and services for cheap. The second-biggest nation economically is preferred by most nations in terms of products and services. The reason behind this is their currency. The very thing Trump has been voicing out.

Tim Cook explains why Apple chooses China for manufacturing.

Can America replace this? pic.twitter.com/MKu0OSydyv

— ADAM (@AdameMedia) April 11, 2025

However,  Tim Cook said, “China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. The reason is because of the skill, the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is.”

According to Tim Cook, the US does not have as many experts as China. He said, “You know, in the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” He added that their expertise is also very deep.

That is not all. Tim Cook said that when it comes to Apple, the products require really advanced tooling and the precision that you have to have in tooling is advanced. Also, their work with the materials is state of the art. 

Apple has not resulted to manufacture in the US, flys in iPhones to the US

Trump’s tariffs are supposed to bring back manufacturing back to the US. However, companies have other ways of surviving tariffs. Apple hired cargo planes to bring iPhones from India to the US a few days before Donald Trump announced his tariff plan.  

A source said that Apple asked Indian airport officials to cut the time needed to clear customs at the Chennai airport from 30 hours to just six hours so that the last flight could leave on time.

Since March, up to six cargo jets, each carrying 100 tonnes, have taken off. One of them took off this week. This is right before new taxes went into effect.

Reuters tests show that an iPhone 14 and its charging cable weigh about 350 grams when packed. This means that, after taking into account some packaging weight, the 600 tonnes of cargo contained about 1.5 million iPhones.

Although this is a good plan, the price of iPhones will still go up. Analysts said that the prices of iPhones in the US could go up because Apple gets a lot of them from China, which is the country with the highest Trump tariff rate at 125%. 

That amount is a lot more than the 26% tariff on goods from India. However, it is now on hold because Trump called for a 90-day pause this week, which doesn’t include China.

However, Apple has not confirmed whether this is true. In fact, the media has not been consistent with the information they have reported. 

The headline of the Times of India (TOI) article said that Apple brought five planes “full of iPhones” from both India and China. However, the first line of the story says that Apple brought “five planes full of iPhones and other products from India” to the US without mentioning China. 

After that, an unnamed source said, “Factories in India, China, and other key locations had been shipping goods to the US in preparation for the higher tariffs.” So, it wasn’t clear if TOI was saying all five planes came from India or if some also came from China.

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