Covid-19, costs and geopolitics are driving the iPhone-maker to manufacture and sell its gadgets elsewhere | CHENNAI AND CUPERTINO By a dusty stretch of the deafening road from Chennai to Bengaluru lie three colossal, anonymous buildings.Apple’s extraordinarily successful past two decades—revenue up 70-fold, share price up 600-fold, a market value of $2.4trn—is partly the result of a big bet on China.Tim Cook, who was Apple’s head of operations before he became chief executive in 2011, pioneered the company’s approach to contract manufacturing.Lockdowns in Shanghai in the first half of this year temporarily shut a factory operated by Quanta, a Taiwanese firm, which was believed to be making most of Apple’s MacBooks.By 2020 a Chinese manufacturing worker typically earned $530 a month, about twice as much as one in India or Vietnam, according to a survey by JETRO, a Japanese industry body."