Don't know what Apple is doing, but it is common for firms to manufacture goods overseas, then put a small finishing touch in the US to get a Made/Assembled in USA label for PR or tax purposes.
At the same time I kind of doubt this is done much for PR purposes. Can't see really people dropping or picking Apple products in favor of alternatives because of the assembly origin.
It's final assembly, screwing the parts together. Gluing the screen. No screws in the screen, so perhaps Apple imagines that connecting cables and gluing the screen counts as assembly, and who is to say otherwise.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisoner...
Federal law requires that products labeled as "Made in the USA" be "all or virtually all" made in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission's guidelines [0] make clear that sewing a "Made in the USA" tag on a foreign-made article of clothing would violate that requirement.
0. http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus03-complying-made-usa-s...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Mariana_Islands#Econom...
Accordingly, products made in the CNMI may be labeled as "Made in USA" (subject to the same rules I cited above). But after the labor scandals of the 1990s, many well known clothing brands that kept their factories there switched to labels like "Made in Northern Marianas, USA".
Since 2009, the CNMI no longer makes its own immigration policy. [0] The islands are now subject to federal immigration law, and all provisions of the Immigration and Naturalization Act will be in effect there from 2014. By that date, the CNMI's workforce will be governed by the same laws as elsewhere in the United States and there will no longer be any real basis for controversy over its "Made in USA" labeling.
0. http://www.dhs.gov/commonwealth-northern-mariana-islands-tra...
The Northern end of Island is spectacularly beautiful and Japanese tourists still would visit there. In the whole of the Micronesia area, Asian tourists outnumber Americans by something like 20 to 1 and the US seems increasingly irrelevant even on the Islands it owns. Interesting.