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US assembly of Apple's new Mac Pro to be handled by Flextronics - report

When it goes into production in America later this year, Apple's new cylindrical Mac Pro desktop will reportedly be built in U.S. facilities run by Singapore-based manufacturer Flextronics.

Purported details on production of Apple's new Mac Pro were reported this week by the Economic Daily News, and highlighted by Macotakara. It was said that the information was shared by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities, who has a strong track record in predicting Apple's future product plans.

The official Flextronics website reveals that the company already has facilities in a number of locations across the U.S., including Texas, California, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and both North and South Carolina. The report did not indicate which U.S.-based Flextronics facility will handle assembly of the new Mac Pro.

"Our United States teams offer a wide spectrum of capabilities, including electrical and mechanical design and the manufacturing of flexible and rigid printed circuit boards and printed circuit board assemblies, specialty coated thin film flexible materials, backplanes, box-build, cable assemblies, camera modules and assembly," the site reads. "Our facilities also have clean room capabilities, functional and reliability testing, new product introduction support, design for manufacturing, supply chain management and logistics."

The transition to Flextronics, if true, would mean that Foxconn will no longer be responsible for manufacturing the Mac Pro. But because Apple's high-end desktop is geared toward a small market, the shift is not expected to have a major effect on Foxconn, which operates largely out of China.

Thermal
Screenshot of thermal core structure animation.

Though Apple will build its new Mac Pro in the U.S., the company is not expected to bring assembly of any of its MacBook lines to America. EDN noted that most of the supply chain remains overseas, which would make it logistically difficult to build large numbers of Macs stateside.

Apple's new MacBook Air units are reportedly being assembled by Quanta Computer, which specializes in laptop construction. Though Quanta does have some facilities in the U.S., it's not expected to begin building MacBooks domestically.

This week, in a rare move, Apple offered a sneak peek at its redesigned Mac Pro desktop, which will sport a small cylindrical design while being powerful enough to drive three 4K-resolution displays. The professional-grade machine is scheduled to arrive later this year with Intel Xeon processors, PCI Express flash storage, and Thunderbolt 2 ports.

As for Kuo, the purported source of the Flextronics rumor, the analyst accurately shared details on Apple's new MacBook Air ahead of this week's announcement at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Specifically, he revealed that the new notebooks would adopt a dual-mic setup for better voice capture, in addition to Intel's latest Haswell processors.