But as Apple taught the supply chain how to perfect multi-touch glass and make the thousand components within the iPhone, Apple’s suppliers took what they knew and offered it to homegrown companies led by Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo. Result: the local market share of such Chinese brands grew by leaps and bounds, from 10 percent in 2009 to 35

The most insane statistic about Apple’s business is this: The iPhone accounts for fewer than 20 percent of smartphones sold around the world, yet it routinely boasts more than 80 percent of industry profits.

Apple’s net margins had jumped from 1.1 percent in 2003 to 26.7 percent in 2012; profits, in the same period, expanded at a meteoric rate from $69 million to $41.7 billion.

When Apple shifted production to China in the early 2000s, Washington believed that free trade would help develop a middle class and inculcate democracy in what was then the world’s most populous country. Instead, economic success empowered China’s rulers, reinforcing their once-tenuous hold on the country and enabling Beijing to weaponize its

Perhaps the most widely publicized incident was that of a seventeen-year-old who underwent black market surgery to sell his kidney in exchange for enough cash to buy a new iPhone and an iPad.

in just a single generation China had gone from a time “when chairman Mao and the Communist Party would purge you for being a private entrepreneur, and you could end up in a gulag, [to a time when] everybody’s making money, including the senior party leadership, living a lifestyle that they couldn’t even imagine two decades earlier.”

but for the burgeoning middle class, the iPhone was both accessible and conspicuous.

China’s urban population had grown from less than 20 percent in 1980 to more than 50 percent by 2012. As hundreds of millions of people were lifted from poverty, many wanted to show it.

Steve Jobs had once said of hiring people: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”