Many of Apple’s hardware products are built overseas, but that’s only part of the story. The New York Times takes a look at Apple’s impact on jobs in the United States, focusing special attention on Austin, Texas where Apple fills a seven-building complex of tech support specialists, microchip engineers, supply chain managers, and people who work in Apple Music, the App Store, and Maps:

Apple’s overall contribution to the American economy is significant. Beyond the 80,000 people it directly employs in the United States, it says 69 supplier facilities in 33 states manufacture parts that go into its products. Hundreds of thousands of software developers also write apps for iPhones and iPads.

Technical support call center employees earn around $30,000 per year, but the average in Austin is around $77,000. Asked by The New York Times whether it planned to expand operations in Austin, Apple said:

“Apple has created over two million jobs in the United States since the introduction of the iPhone nine years ago, including explosive growth in iOS developers, thousands of new supplier and manufacturing partners, and a 400 percent increase in our employee teams,” the company said in a statement. “We made the unique decision to keep and expand our contact centers for customers in the Americas in the United States, and Austin is home to many of those employees. We plan to continue to invest and grow across the U.S.”

Apple’s Austin offices have grown a lot over time, but don’t get much attention despite their size. The New York Times’ article is an interesting overview of the breadth of Apple’s impact on the US economy and peek inside Apple’s Texas offices.

Great post by Horace Dediu on how to look at Apple’s evolution over the next four decades:

My simple proposal is to think of Apple (and actually any company) as a customer creator. It creates and maintains customers. The more it creates, the more it prospers. The more customers it preserves the more it’s likely to persevere. This measure of performance for a company is not easy to obtain. It’s not a line item in any financial report.

The closest figure we have is that today Apple has one billion active devices in use. We’re not told of the total users or total customers because Apple cannot count people or wallets as accurately as it can count active devices. But as imperfect as it is, this number gives us a way to get close to counting customers.

Jason Snell:

People who aren’t journalists may not realize the neat trick Jobs pulled. Product announcements are basically press releases: They’re publicity. They’re arguably news, but they’re boring news — and a cynical writer could view them as free PR for the company putting out the press release. Rewriting a press release is one of the lower forms of journalism.

Covering an Apple event didn’t feel like that, and it still doesn’t. It feels like an event, and when you’re reporting on it, you’re not rewriting a press release — you’re covering something as it happens live, just as if you were in the White House briefing room during a presidential press conference. In the end, these Apple events are just product announcements — the brilliance is that the stagecraft makes them much more interesting to journalists and fans alike.

I’ve only ever been to one Apple event (coincidentally, where I also met Jason), and I couldn’t agree more. It was a product announcement, but it felt like a surreal movie premiere full of nerds. I loved it.