Tim Cook: “We will Continue To Produce the Mac Pro In the USA”

Apple has declared during the WWDC that the production of the Mac Pro would be made in China, but by the looks of it, the company rethought that decision and  has apparently decided to hold the assembly in the United States , which is why it asked for an exemption for the components.

“We’ve been making the Mac Pro in the US and we want to continue doing that,” Cook had said on a conference all with analysts, which took place on Tuesday. “And so we’re working and investing currently in [the] capacity to do so because we want to continue to be here.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook, thought about it yesterday and responded remotely to President Trump by clarifying that the duty exemption request was simply linked to Apple’s willingness to continue assembling the Mac Pro in the United States.

Trump, last week, had responded to the request via Twitter by writing clearly that he would not grant any exemption to Apple, provided that Apple had not decided to build the Mac Pro in the United States. Tim Cook responded, and offered what Trump was asking for: a Mac Pro “Made in the USA“.

It is now fair to expect that Trump’s answer might just grant the exemption from duties requested by Apple, as the U.S President can say that it has finally managed to get a company such as Apple to produce everything in house, within the U.S. 

And yet, if the US administration were to grant exemption from duties, both Apple as well as the future buyers of the Mac Pro would win. Apple asked for exemption for what appear to be all the components necessary to mount a Mac Pro, excluding CPU, GPU, RAM and SSD disks, components produced by Intel, AMD and by third parties that Apple will buy directly from the manufacturers.

This means that “Made in USA” would be a simple assembly of a product that was created to be flexible, modular and configurable even by users. Apple has had some production problems with the old Mac Pro, but the new model was designed to be built in less than an hour with the same ease of assembly of an Ikea furniture.

All the components, definitely more difficult to produce, would still be made in China but as far as importing these components goes, Apple would still save  around 25% in costs. 

Considering that we are, at the end of the day, standing in front of a product that costs around $5,999 dollars at its most basic configuration, the risk of seeing the price rise beyond the announced figure is very much real at this point.