When the Reese Witherspoon character in Legally Blonde stood in line wearing her pink bunny ears to buy a laptop and study for the LSATs, an iBook was the obvious choice.

was worried about pushing too hard, creating even greater risks of

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.

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.

The vitriolic commentary directed at Apple following the CCTV episode, coupled with a sharp decline in China sales, underscored that Apple’s gargantuan operations in the country had created the company’s biggest vulnerability: its newfound dependence on a single country, China. For the prior decade this risk had felt remote. China was opening to

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

Apple needed, he says, was differentiation.

the notion that Apple is at its peak is patent nonsense. But there is one Achilles’ heel: The fate of all the company’s hardware production relies on the good graces of America’s largest rival.

With no regulatory oversight of what was happening, a shift in where all this work was being performed was inevitable. The cofounder of Intel, Andy Grove, would later diagnose the problem as “a general undervaluing of manufacturing—the idea that as long as ‘knowledge work’ stays in the US, it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs.” But as