Apple's U.S. Mac-making plan would create 200 jobs -- report

CEO Tim Cook's remark that Apple will invest $100 million in manufacturing Macs in the states will mean the creation of 200 jobs, some industry watchers say.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor

Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.

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Edward Moyer

Dec. 8, 2012 2:34 p.m. PT

2 min read

Various industry watchers are weighing in on Apple CEO Tim Cook's remark this week that the company will invest $100 million into making Macs in the U.S., with some saying the move will create 200 new jobs.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, Cook was asked what it would take to get Apple back to building products in the states. Cook said, in part: "Next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac. We've been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it. It will happen in 2013. We're really proud of it. We could have quickly maybe done just assembly, but it's broader because we wanted to do something more substantial."

That new stateside effort "sounds like a 200-job operation with about a million-unit output," Dan Luria told Bloomberg in a separate story last night. Luria studies factory operations as a labor economist at Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center in Plymouth, Mich., the news agency says. Bloomberg also reports that Michael Marks, former CEO of Flextronics International, a major global contract manufacturer, agrees with that estimate.

A plan by Lenovo to make PCs in North Carolina serves as a good template for how Apple's effort may play out, Bloomberg reports, citing Harvard Business School Professor Willy Shih. And the news agency adds that according to Lenovo's director of global supply-chain communications, Mark Stanton, manufacturing jobs pay about $32,000 a year, with skilled positions in the range of $65,000 a year.