Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (Apple News+):

Apple will move some production of its Mac Mini desktop computer to the U.S. from Asia, the company told The Wall Street Journal, its latest initiative to reshore parts of its vast supply chain.

The new manufacturing effort will begin later this year at a Foxconn facility in north Houston, said Sabih Khan, Apple’s chief operating officer. He described the plan while taking the Journal on the first public tour of the facility’s two primary buildings, one where Foxconn assembles Apple’s AI servers, another, currently a cavernous warehouse, that will be converted to 220,000 square feet of manufacturing space for the Mini.

The Mini is a niche product for Apple, responsible for less than 5% of Apple’s sales of Mac computers globally last year, estimates Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, and less than 1% of total sales. It is popular among app developers writing software for Apple products, and more recently among people looking to run AI agent software from their desktop.

Mac Mini production will continue in Asia, said Khan. As the U.S. assembly line ramps up, it will meet local demand, he said.

The key word here is “some”; even for such a low-volume product as the Mac mini, it is unfeasible to assemble Apple products in the United States. Apple has made a few Macs in Austin previously, including the 2013 Mac Pro, which sold terribly, and the 2019 Mac Pro, known for the infamous photoshoot with President Trump in 2019, where he took credit for the factory’s construction. My spitball yet entirely reasonable guess is that a photoshoot is exactly the reason for this announcement: Apple wants to be exempt from the 15 percent flat tax Trump imposed on all foreign imports after the regime’s tariff loss in the Supreme Court earlier in February.

As the new Houston factory kickstarts production of the Mac mini, Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, will invite Trump down to Houston — perhaps with a special appearance from Governor Greg Abbott of Texas and some other administration appointees — to tour the new factory and take credit for its creation. They’ll take some photos, make a few speeches, exchange some handshakes, and carry on waging war across America. When the ordeal is done, Apple will correctly realize the factory is an unprofitable pit that’s difficult to staff and maintain, then wind down production in about a year to no fanfare.

The 2019 Mac Pro is proof of this strategy. Of course Apple knew it’d be shipping Apple silicon Macs in a few years and that it wouldn’t have to keep the Austin Mac Pro plant up and running for very long. It announced the transition, moved production of the Mac Pro back to China for a bit, then shifted more production to Vietnam as the Apple silicon version began production. It made Trump happy right before he lost the election, and if Trump’s happy, Cook’s happy. Whatever happened in 2019 was just politics because Cook knows assembling Apple products in the United States is too expensive and difficult. As much as Cook is subservient to Trump, his profits matter more.

Now, if Cook really wanted to do well for the United States at the risk of his relationship with the regime, he could lobby Trump to release funds under the Chips and Science Act, which funded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plant in Arizona. This plant could significantly reduce Apple’s reliance on Taiwan, a politically tumultuous island that China could raid at any minute. Taiwan is Apple’s largest and worst vulnerability, and Cook knows this, hence the Arizona plant, where Apple plans to begin producing 2-nanometer processors in 2030. But that is far too late, and Cook could score a win for “Big Tech” in the eyes of casual Americans by bringing more highly paid jobs to one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country, Phoenix.

But I guess fealty trumps common sense in that scenario, and that Cook is betting on a Democratic administration to do something about the project in 2030, when the time comes.