Patrick McGee – Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company — A stunningly insightful book. I genuinely thought I knew everything there was to know about Apple — but this is a trove of new, often surprising material. Not just about Apple or China, but about globalization as a whole, and the deep contrasts between cultures.

At its core, it's a vivid case study of how today's high-tech manufacturing became so intertwined with China — and how Apple played a pivotal role in making that happen. And why.

Where to get

• 📚 Hardcover
• 📱 Kindle eBook
• 🎧 Audible audiobook

More information

• 🌐 Author's website

When some country or entire civilization develops separately from the rest and without contact, and over a long period of time major divergences begin in how they do things.

Unfortunately, there haven't been examples in the last few hundred years where both such civilizations that encountered each other again were comparable in development, yet had different approaches to organizing life and society. What happens is that one strongly dominates the other. Now on earth there are basically no other places left that are big enough for someone to develop in their own unique way. And so it turns out that we, along with you, all the readers and all your personal and virtual acquaintances, have long been in this very "developed" civilization. We're unlikely to meet aliens anytime soon, and even if we do, it'll be interesting for a different reason. But to encounter another specifically human civilization that's no less developed but unique, does many things differently - that would be really fascinating. There's so much we could learn. In anthropology this is called a "natural experiment" by the way.

To some extent this exists on a less radical level just between countries. Like, you go live somewhere in another country, and there they already have their own customs, their own cool conveniences and local neat stuff. More often of course there'll be more local quirks and inconveniences, which maybe aren't worse than "ours," it's just that we've already gotten used to ours, while there you still need to figure things out on the go. There was such a strong divide between the socialist bloc and the west, but that's already passed. It was even more complicated there because along with the opening to the west came the destruction of the previous system and therefore mass poverty and disorder, crime and for many just straight-up devastation.

But I'm really talking about something else. I'm just genuinely curious how a completely different society could develop. Where the economic model is different, where the structure of the state, family and education are absolutely nothing like ours, maybe there's even something that's just as important as education, rule of law and the institution of family, but we just don't have it at all, while they do and it's really significant. Maybe when that moment comes that we all eventually go into some kind of hyper-spaces and start living in literally completely isolated bubbles. And then a couple generations later there'll be this kind of gap. I'd love to find some like that right now, but only if they weren't malicious, because examples of savagery do exist after all, and there everything's different, it's just that you don't want to learn from that.

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist and philosopher. As history has shown, Marxists failed to predict the future course of society, but they were remarkably good at exposing the flaws of their own era. After all, they fought real fascists — the genuine, vicious kind, not just anyone who happens to disagree, as is fashionable to label them today. And so I find myself noticing that Gramsci is being quoted quite a lot these days — and for good reason. He wrote about the “time of monsters” in his “Prison Notebooks,” penned during his imprisonment in a fascist jail in the 1930s.

His famous phrase goes like this: “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.” which translates as: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid phenomena appear.”

I actually like it even better when paraphrased: “The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born — now is the time of monsters.”

And this, of course, applies fully to our own time. The old order — the postwar New Deal — is dying, above all, decaying from within, contrary to the beliefs of many propagandists and ideologues of the Global South. That’s the real root: the old world’s inability to prioritize first principles. The strength of all the dictators of our day lies in the weaknesses of the so-called “developed” world. The monsters are those who exploit the chaos between orders, but they are not the new order. Who the new will be, we don’t know, but it certainly won’t be the party autocrats.

When computers first appeared, they were huge in size. And of course, they were incredibly difficult to use. Only specialists working in the field could operate them, or those who bought directly from companies and told them what kind of computer to build to order. Then came the so-called mainframes. There it became accessible to a wider circle. But still, the computers themselves were somewhere in a central location, and everyone worked on them remotely. And communicated through a terminal, meaning typing commands and getting something printed on screen in response, or later something printed on a printer.

Then personal computers appeared. When a person could already install something there themselves. They were very expensive and slower than those central ones, but gave much more freedom in what and how to do. Then these personal computers became cheaper, simpler to use, more accessible, and there became much more of them. Then these personal computers shrank altogether, became cheaper and turned into smartphones. We carry them with us, and their usage significantly exceeds the usage of personal computers.

And then AI appeared. And notice how resembels old paradime as if we are sent back.

Not even that it rolled back, but you could say a new branch of this whole path appeared — from a complex computer that only uber-narrow specialists use (this is pre-GPT-3), then a phase when it's like a mainframe, where we all connect to a central server and type something there, getting printed responses (meaning through all these ChatGPTs and the like). Now comes the phase like when there were first personal computers. Some are already running models on their own computers. But this is still very rare — difficult and expensive. The era when "mobile" devices for AI will appear is still ahead. And most likely, this branch, though it will be similar, will have many things different in both UX and UI.

I now prefer using those same LLMs on a computer more, my use of mobile devices compared to computers has decreased significantly, largely because of wanting to do something with AI. Well, and for other reasons too, of course. I still want computers to be smarter and more convenient. A unified OS across all devices. Like a cloud-OS that's fully synchronized and knows everything about me. Different types of devices are for different caliber tasks. Something's more convenient on the go, and thus portability will prevail there, something's more convenient to do on a huge screen, with a big keyboard, mouse, tablet. Something on a touchscreen, something without a screen at all, purely by voice. And so on. And as the main agent in all this — an AI that knows everything about me, but at the same time doesn't share my data with any third party without my explicit permission.

Currently on devices, this main "agent" is the file system and its interface, like Windows Explorer or Finder, or Springboard on iOS. They're the ones that kinda "know" about what we work with, storing and managing our files. But these agents are still extremely dumb, and therefore we have to do the same things many times a day. Even today's LLM models would handle that incomparably better.

So it is clear that the power of models is already sufficient for radical improvements, but specifically making products based on them lags far behind. And although it seems like there's now an endless bunch of different AI-based products — all of this is too little, and primarily because they do all this on a superficial level, not at the operating system level. And here, of course, it's a disgrace. Apple simply slept through this entire LLM revolution and still can't get their act together. Google only partially slept through it, already woke up, but institutionally they're weak at good productization. Microsoft is too big, unwieldy, greedy and very weak on taste, and apparently fell behind ideologically so they can't imagine how everything they do could be done differently. I won't even talk about Linux. Unfortunately, nerds aren't capable of thinking creatively with the user first. And these are the main players in the systems field.

Of course, others will appear, new ones, who will do everything better, but because this isn't coming from the current main system players, all this will happen noticeably later — there's just too much to do, and almost everything from scratch. But the "mobile" era of devices might go completely differently, and that's intriguing. I think it'll be even more interesting.

Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo back when he was in Arles, dropped a very interesting phrase — or rather, a quote — that stuck with me a long time ago. Initially, when I saw it, I didn’t know where it came from. Now I do — and I’m going to tell you the story.

In 1704, in Memphis, Egypt, they found an ancient Egyptian funerary stele. Not from the oldest period of Egypt, but nevertheless — it’s from the Ptolemaic era. (That’s when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, really liked it there, even built a city — Alexandria — and then one of his generals, Ptolemy, stayed on to rule. That’s how the Ptolemaic dynasty began, which ended with Cleopatra.) Later, the stele was moved to France, to a town called Carpentras. How it got there — nobody really knows. Probably got snatched from Egypt at some point and shipped to France.

What makes it interesting is that it has inscriptions in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Aramaic, and Greek. But back then, no one could read the hieroglyphs — the stone was partly damaged, the hieroglyphic portion of the text was fragmentary, and most importantly — Champollion hadn’t yet enlightened us with his insights. It would be a hundred years before he figured out that hieroglyphs weren’t just symbolic, but also had phonetic elements. That breakthrough came only after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Jean-François Champollion cracked the code in 1822, thanks to that stone, which had been found back in 1799 during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt.

So, when the stele eventually made its way to Carpentras, a local newspaper wrote about it — and that’s where our Vincent van Gogh came across it. People couldn’t read the hieroglyphs yet, but the Greek and Aramaic parts they could handle. So the article described the inscription, and among other things it said: "Here lies Taba, daughter of Tahapi, priestess of Osiris, who never complained about anything."

Van Gogh was deeply struck by that line. In fact, he mentions it in several letters to both his brother and his sister. And really — it’s not so easy to live a life, even a leisurely one, like someone from the privileged class, without ever complaining about anyone. When I first came across this phrase, I had no idea it came from Van Gogh’s letters — just the phrase itself, about this woman named Phoebe (that’s how I heard it first, and that’s how I wrote it down; now they say it should sound like Taba) — who never complained about anyone or anything.

Van Gogh asks his brother to tell Gauguin about her, and says that when he compares himself to this Taba (he calls her Thebe), he feels ungrateful. That real happiness lies in serenity — and when you have that, you may have this “real South” within your soul.

So yeah — may we all have a bit of that real South in our souls.

I was born and raised in Moscow—a big city, not southern at all, and very far from the real sea. But we used to go to the seaside often with my parents, usually in the summer. And I have this vivid feeling from those moments: you drive and drive, and then bam, there it is—the sea in the distance.

That moment left such a strong emotional mark on me that even now, whenever I see the sea like that, far away, I feel a little spark of joy. And now it’s not even far from home anymore, you’d think I’d be used to it—but childhood emotions always take over.

By the way, have you noticed how some trees already have deep red leaves? like in the fall, even though it’s May? It’s a particular kind of maple.

About three thousand years ago, in India, the epic Mahabharata was composed — one of the longest literary works in human history, roughly four times the length of War and Peace.

The most famous part is the Bhagavad Gita (“Song of God”), where Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna how to live rightly and understand his duty.

But there are other parts too, like the episode called The Questions of the Yaksha. In it, the wise prince Yudhishthira is tested by a mystical being with a series of philosophical riddles. One of them is:

“What is the most amazing thing in the world?” Yudhishthira replies:

“Day after day, countless people die. Yet the living act as if they are immortal. That is the most amazing thing.”

I came across this line while reading a popular science book on physics (The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli) — the topic was time. The discussion veered into philosophy, and this thought felt perfectly placed.