India, Aug. 28 -- Apple was spending millions of dollars every year just to fly its people to China. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the company sent hundreds of US engineers there each month to work with the contract manufacturers that built most of its products.

An excerpt from Dan Wang's book Breakneck, shared by pre-seed investor Rahul Mathur on X, details the scale of Apple's travel between California and China.

"It wasn't simply Apple dreaming up new ideas for its manufacturers to execute. Rather, it was a collaborative process between Cuper- tino and Shenzhen. "[Apple products are] not designed and sent over. That sounds like there's no interaction," Apple CEO Tim Cook once told an interviewer. The idea of having something designed...