Why Tim Cook made friends with Donald Trump

Apple CEO Tim Cook will be spending the afternoon of November 20th making conversation with President Donald Trump. The two are scheduled to tour a factory in Austin, Texas, where Apple is manufacturing its new Mac Pro. The president does this kind of photo op all the time as a way of promoting US manufacturing jobs (recent trips include a Louis Vuitton workshop near Dallas and a paper mill south of Toledo, Ohio), and Apple seems to be eagerly playing along. This morning, the company sent out a press release touting its new Austin campus and boasting that it is “on track to contribute $350 billion to the US economy between 2018 and 2023.” These are the kinds of statistics that Trump desperately needs as his trade policies stall out amid...

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