Apple won’t be exempted from tariffs on five Chinese-made components for the upcoming modular Mac Pro, even after the company announced it was keeping some assembly operations in the U.S., reports Bloomberg.
On Sept. 23, Apple confirmed that the Mac Pro would be manufactured in Austin, Texas. The tech giant said will begin production “soon” at the same Austin facility where Mac Pro has been made since 2013.
The new Mac Pro will include components designed, developed and manufactured by more than a dozen American companies for distribution to U.S. customers. Manufacturers and suppliers across Arizona, Maine, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas and Vermont, including Intersil and ON Semiconductor, are providing technology.
Apple said the U.S. manufacturing of Mac Pro is made possible following a federal product exclusion Apple is receiving for certain necessary components. The value of American-made components in the new Mac Pro is reportedly 2.5 times greater than in Apple’s previous generation Mac Pro, according to the tech giant.
However, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office denied Apple’s request for relief from 25% tariffs on the much-discussed optional wheels for Apple’s Mac Pro, a circuit board for managing input and output ports, power adapter, charging cable and a cooling system for the computer’s processor.
In letters to Apple posted online, USTR said the five exclusion requests were denied because they “failed to show that the imposition of additional duties on the particular product would cause severe economic harm to you or other U.S. interests, Bloomberg adds.
In its 15 requests for exclusions posted July 18, Apple said the devices or components are not related to Chinese industrial programs — and that “there are no other sources for this proprietary, Apple-designed component.”
Unveiled at June’s Worldwide Developer Conference, the upcoming Mac Pro features a six-channel memory architecture and 12 physical DIMM slots. It will allow for 1.5TB of memory, the most ever available in a Mac. The Mac Pro will pack eight PCI Express expansion slots, which is twice that of the previous-generation Mac Pro tower.
It will also sport up to 56 teraflops of graphics performance, the Apple MPX Module graphics expansion architecture, and power GPU options. Pricing will start at $5,999.
