But take a minute to contemplate that word "assembled." Those Chinese factory workers aren't making Apple products from scratch; they're putting them together from pre-existing components -- components that weren't built in the same factory, or even in the same country. Curious about how the family tree of a typically complex piece of computer equipment, I decided to try to track down the origins of the major components in that computer -- a mid-2010 13" MacBook Pro model. Where did it come from before it got to me? How many parents did it have? The journey travels over much of Asia, of course, but there are also components that come from right here in the U.S.A.

At the heart of my MacBook Pro laptop, which is a couple years old at this point, is a Core 2 Duo chip from Intel. This is one of Intel's Penryn family of chips, and was therefore probably manufactured at Intel's relatively new fabrication facility in Chandler, Arizona. . Intel has other factories in the American Southwest, in California, and in Ireland and Israel.