I find that quote maddening. The lack of self awareness of the irony in Tim Cook’s statement is astounding and I say this as a huge fan of Apple’s products. I think it’s very disingenuous for him to claim that America lacks tooling engineers when the very reason for this is that companies just like Apple started outsourcing all manufacturing and engineering work to China a few decades ago, in pursuit of lower costs (ignoring the very obvious reasons it cost so much less, while out of the other side of their mouths, loudly patting themselves on the back for supposedly standing for human/environmental rights). This, in effect, for all intents and purposes played a huge role in crippling American manufacturing. Of course it technically still exists, but only a fraction of what it was as recently as the 1990s.
Fast forward to today, per Cook’s own words, China “stopped being the low-labor-cost-country” it once was, so in effect we’re not only back to paying higher prices, now we also no longer have the capabilities to manufacture and engineer that we once had, so it’s a massive net loss for the entire country, and yet Tim Cook is essentially calling people out of touch for suggesting the US could handle the job - when companies like his own are the very reason it no longer easily can today.
Friendly suggestion for Apple and other American corporations: please consider using some of those tens of billions in cash on hand each of your companies have, and invest in helping fix the problem you contributed to: help bring manufacturing and tooling engineering back to your home country. You can solve some of the most difficult engineering problems in the world, you can design a chip that squeezes billions of transistors into a tiny fingernail sized chip, and you can make pocket sized phones that have changed the world. You can do this too!