Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple, said in an interview that the recently emerged iMac computers that were assembled in the USA were not and exclusion that occurred because of tight supply, but actually part of the plan to bring some production back to the country. As it appears, Apple wants to bring production of one of its product lines completely to the U.S.

“We have been working for years on doing more and more in the United States. Next year we will do one of our existing Mac lines in the United States,” said Mr. Cook in an interview with NBC News.

When asked whether manufacturing in the USA will actually increase pricing of products, the head of Apple explained that the production costs would not necessarily grow up dramatically, but at present the U.S. lacks skills needed for modern high-volume manufacturing. The latter seems to be absolutely correct since Apple’s manufacturing partner Foxconn employs hundreds of thousands of workers at its facilities in China in order to build tens of millions of iPhones, iPads, iPods and Macs per quarter. It is impossible to find hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. to work at megafabs akin to Foxconn’s. 

Select new-generation Apple iMac all-on-one PCs are assembled in the U.S., according to iFixit, a PC repair expert company that performs teardown analysis of various products. The FTC states that, for a device to have an “Assembled in USA” label, there needs to be an extensive amount of work done domestically, and the product’s last “substantial transformation” needs to occur in the U.S., reports Digital Trends web-site.

“We will do as many of these things [in America] as we can do. You can bet that we will use the whole of our influence to do this,” said Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, at a conference earlier this year.

It turns out that starting next year Apple's manufacturing partners (presumably, Flextronics, Sanmina-SCI or even Foxconn itself) will assemble iMac product line entirely in the United States.

Tags: Apple, iMac, Business, Foxconn, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac, macbook