Skip to main content

Apple gives Mac Pro its ‘Made in the USA’ badge by moving assembly to Texas

After years of relying on manufacturing facilities in Asia, Apple announced that its new and pricey redesigned Mac Pro will be made in the USA. While final assembly of the product will be done in Austin, Texas, the company stated in a press release that the high-end desktop — which has been compared to a cheese grater due to its aesthetics — will also utilize components made by more than a dozen American manufacturers and suppliers located in states that include Arizona, Maine, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Vermont.

Apple was only able to manufacture its Mac Pro in the U.S. after receiving a federal product exclusion for some necessary components. Previously, in 2013, Apple announced plans to move the Mac Pro to the United States, but since that date, it’s been rumored that Apple may have instead been exploring plans to keep its manufacturing facilities in China, probably to keep costs down. Most recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that the desktop PC would be manufactured in a Quanta Computer manufacturing plant outside of Shanghai. However, it appears that Apple has changed its mind once again, and the company is moving forward with its plans to build the Mac Pro, which starts at $6,000, in Austin.

The move to bring the Mac Pro’s manufacturing back to the United States follows Apple’s highly publicized struggles with the U.S. government’s tariffs against foreign-made goods enacted by the administration of President Donald Trump as it engages in a trade war with China. Trump had earlier alluded in a series of tweets on Twitter that Apple would not get any tariff exemptions, and that the company should bring manufacturing back to the States.

“Apple will not be given tariff waiver, or relief, for Mac Pro parts that are made in China,” the President wrote on the social media platform. “Make them in the USA, no Tariffs!” If tariffs are enforced, the price on consumer electronics, many of which are manufactured in China, could increase.

Apple highlighted the number of jobs and its investment in the American economy in its announcement. “We believe deeply in the power of American innovation,” CEO Tim Cook said in a prepared statement. “That’s why every Apple product is designed and engineered in the U.S., and made up of parts from 36 states, supporting 450,000 jobs with U.S. suppliers, and we’re going to continue growing here.” The company noted that it spent $60 billion last year alone working with 9,000 domestic suppliers in those 36 states.

Apple isn’t the only company to assemble its premium desktops in the United States, as the move mirrors what boutique PC gaming firms like Falcon Northwest, Digital Storm, and Origin PC have been doing for years.

Editors' Recommendations

Chuong Nguyen
Silicon Valley-based technology reporter and Giants baseball fan who splits his time between Northern California and Southern…
Apple quietly backtracks on the MacBook Air’s biggest issue
The MacBook Air on a white table.

The new MacBook Air with M3 chip not only allows you to use it with two external displays, but it has also reportedly addressed a storage problem that plagued the previous M2 model. The laptop now finally has much faster storage performance since Apple has switched back to using two 128GB NAND modules instead of a single 256GB module on the SSD drive.

This was discovered by the YouTuber Max Tech, who tore down the entry-level model of the MacBook Air M3 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. In his tests, thanks to the two NAND modules, the M3 MacBook Air is nearly double faster than the M2 MacBook Air. Blackmagic Disk Speed tests show that the older M2 model with the problematic NAND chip had a 1584.3 Mb/s write speed, and the newer M3 model had 2108.9 Mb/s for the M3 model, for a 33% difference. In read speeds, it was 1576.4 Mb/s on the old model and 2880.2 Mb/s on the newer model.

Read more
Here’s why the Vision Pro succeeded where the Apple Car failed
Apple Car rendering from Vanarama.

Everywhere you look, the failure of Apple’s secret self-driving car is dominating the news. Yet, it comes shortly after another moonshot project -- the Vision Pro -- launched to higher-than-expected initial sales. Why did one crash and burn while the other was successfully brought to market?

Well, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman has attempted to answer that question in his latest Power On newsletter, which claims that the Apple Car (known internally as Project Titan) was “doomed nearly from the start.” In the end, there are many reasons for its failure that the Vision Pro was able to navigate its way around.

Read more
The MacBook Air M3 has one change that fixes its biggest flaw
The screen of the MacBook Air M2.

With surprisingly little fanfare — no spring event this time — Apple has dropped an update to the MacBook Air a bit sooner than expected. The incredibly thin MacBook Air 13- and 15-inch models both received updates to the Apple Silicon M3 chipsets, but that's not all.

There's one surprising new feature in the mix that could make a big difference in purchasing decisions: support for multiple monitors with the display closed. As this was the major complaint of the previous MacBook Air, this change is a pretty big deal. While it still supports only a total of two screens, it's a positive change for those that want to connect to two large, external monitors for work.

Read more