[jyl]

Yeah, that was naive.

Apple has a large campus (many buildings) in Cupertino where they employ many thousands of engineering, software, marketing, creative, admin, logistics etc types. They do more of their R&D work in the US than practically any other major consumer electronics company. Their products are assembled in China from components produced by a variety of companies from the US, Taiwan/Korea, China and other Asia, and Europe.

It is pretty interesting to look at the bill of materials for an iPhone. Let's say Apple gets $500 per iPhone. About $310 of that is gross profit, most of which goes to pay for all those engineers and etc in Cupertino, with the remainder for Apple shareholders, who are mostly in the US. About $180 of that is components, enclosure, packaging, etc. You can figure out if those components are bought from US, Asian, or European sources. For the components etc bought from US or European sources, you can figure out how much is gross profit for those companies and thus goes to pay for US or European engineers etc, and how much is manufacturing costs which usually ends up being paid to an Asian fab. (Oh, also include the assembly at Foxconn).

I did this, and it looks like, more or less, of the $500 (est) that Apple gets for an iPhone 4, 62% of that money ends up in the US, 35% ends up in Asia, and 3% ends up in Europe.