It comes down to 1)logistical costs, i.e. the cost of shipping a final product v/s shipping parts of the product. 2) Safety/damage rates of the items thus transported 3) Speed of transportation in either formats

With the see-sawing of freight rates, Mr. Cook might be tweaking on the cost benefit analysis.

The ultimate examples being "pressing boxed software". Assemble the box, manuals, etc. in a certain country, add the value during that step in the form of components, with the license not being dutiable, but a boxed software item imported would be.

Regulatory arbitrage at its finest. This is pretty much why Apple makes some iPads in Brazil now.

Also the US has weird loopholes with some territories or other treaty countries, so you can do less work to make something "made in USA" in some places and some industries than in others (I think Saipan, American Samoa, Puerto Rico have special status)

Also, there is no 30-day warranty in the US. It's a minimum of 1 year on parts and labor. 30 days is the legal amount of time you have to return a defective item to the store for a full refund (doesn't apply to EOL/clearance items which have been severely discounted to account for the loss of warranty).

Also, as I learned the hard way recently, this 2-year EU warranty isn't in effect everywhere and the process to get compensation usually gets you lots of runaround.

It was merely a comment on the probability of increased profits, from the assembled in the US markings, you have to remember that about 60% of Apple profits (and still climbing) come from outside the US, and outside the US, the markings would not mean as much.

Now, if we're talking about further boosting their prices to maintain the same margins...

At the same time I kind of doubt this is done much for PR purposes. Can't see really people dropping or picking Apple products in favor of alternatives because of the assembly origin.

It's final assembly, screwing the parts together. Gluing the screen. No screws in the screen, so perhaps Apple imagines that connecting cables and gluing the screen counts as assembly, and who is to say otherwise.

Federal law requires that products labeled as "Made in the USA" be "all or virtually all" made in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission's guidelines [0] make clear that sewing a "Made in the USA" tag on a foreign-made article of clothing would violate that requirement.

0. http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus03-complying-made-usa-s...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Mariana_Islands#Econom...

Accordingly, products made in the CNMI may be labeled as "Made in USA" (subject to the same rules I cited above). But after the labor scandals of the 1990s, many well known clothing brands that kept their factories there switched to labels like "Made in Northern Marianas, USA".

Since 2009, the CNMI no longer makes its own immigration policy. [0] The islands are now subject to federal immigration law, and all provisions of the Immigration and Naturalization Act will be in effect there from 2014. By that date, the CNMI's workforce will be governed by the same laws as elsewhere in the United States and there will no longer be any real basis for controversy over its "Made in USA" labeling.

0. http://www.dhs.gov/commonwealth-northern-mariana-islands-tra...

The Northern end of Island is spectacularly beautiful and Japanese tourists still would visit there. In the whole of the Micronesia area, Asian tourists outnumber Americans by something like 20 to 1 and the US seems increasingly irrelevant even on the Islands it owns. Interesting.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisoner...