Apple plans to make Mac minis in the US

Illustrating the extent to which it is willing to work with the Trump Administration — and as President Donald J. Trump prepares for tonight’s State of the Union address — Apple now says it will begin to make Mac minis in Houston later this year. The Macs will be made at the same factory where the company now makes server chips.

 “Apple is deeply committed to the future of American manufacturing, and we’re proud to significantly expand our footprint in Houston with the production of Mac mini starting later this year,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “We began shipping advanced AI servers from Houston ahead of schedule, and we’re excited to accelerate that work even further.”

Supporting its own announcement, Apple Chief Operating Officer Sabih Khan also shared the promise during an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We’re very excited to tell you that later this year we will be beginning Mac mini manufacturing right here in this space,” he said.

Khan suggested the new factory will churn out “thousands” of Macs each week.

Apple’s US manufacturing expansion

This decision means Mac mini now becomes the second modern Apple PC to be manufactured in the US, alongside the Mac Pro. The company also makes servers for Private Cloud Compute at the same facility, and intends to expand advanced AI server manufacturing there.

To some extent, the hardware Apple chooses to make in the US likely reflects the complexity and production volume demands of those products. In some cases, Apple cannot make the product because it can’t yet source enough of the highly-skilled people it needs to do so. To solve that problem, Apple is currently investing more than $600 billion, including the creation of an Academy in Detroit. The company is also launching a huge, 20,000-foot advanced manufacturing skills training center near the new Mac mini factory. 

“The dedicated facility will provide hands-on training in advanced manufacturing techniques to students, supplier employees, and American businesses of all sizes,” Apple said.

Creating opportunity in manufacturing

Apple’s US investment plan includes directly hiring 20,000 people over four years, with a focus on R&D, silicon engineering, software development, and AI. Apple has particularly focused its job-reshoring efforts on such high-tech, high-value tasks and revealed it has now sourced more than 20 billion US-made chips from 24 factories across the US for use in its products. 

Third-party partners are all aboard: GlobalWafers has begun production at its new $4 billion bare silicon wafer facility in Sherman, TX. Apple will also purchase 100 million advanced chips produced by TSMC at its new Arizona facility this year.

Each of these investments creates new employment opportunities for US workers, while also protecting some of the highest value components used in Apple devices from tariffs. Every job counts, of course, given that US job creation has slowed to around 15,000 new jobs a month. In that context, the additional employment Apple provides means a lot — particularly as we all now anticipate wide-scale replacement and displacement  of many human employees with smart machines.

Tariffs and their impact

Apple’s promise to bring Mac mini production to the US might or might not be enough to persuade the US government to spare it from some of the tariffs put in place since the courts rejected the earlier tranche. Just like every other enterprise, company leaders will certainly hope for better business stability; Apple has paid more than $3 billion in tariffs since 2025 at a rate of around $1 billion a quarter.

While the truth about these added taxes is that consumers end up paying them on the products they buy, they also create instability and impose pressure on profitability across the entire supply chain, which is bad for business.

Many US brands have leaned on their manufacturing partners to take a haircut on price in order to sustain these tariffs while keeping existing prices, and there’s little reason to think Apple hasn’t done the same thing. That may be fine in the short term, but in the medium/long term, reducing profitability at key suppliers puts their business at risk. This creates a chain of events in which key suppliers cease trading, leaving US companies gasping and grasping for replacements in what becomes a seller’s market.

No matter how challenging the seas become, Apple must navigate them somehow; its current compliance shows it is attempting to do just that, even as it prepares for a changing of the guard of its leadership class. Who and what will the company be tomorrow?

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