Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a lengthy interview with Politico which was published yesterday, shedding some light on what he plans to say in his upcoming congressional appearance on Apple's tax practices. There's a hidden gem at the end of the piece, however:

And Cook is also promoting a $100 million investment in domestic manufacturing, where the company will begin producing a new version of a current Mac product later this year. "We’re going very deep in this project," Cook said, noting that not only will the final product be manufactured in the US, but so will many of its components. Arizona, Texas, Illinois, Florida and Kentucky are among the states he mentioned as having parts and assembly located.

Apple has made noise for some time now about moving part of its manufacturing back to the United States. Indeed, when our newly minted Senior Product Specialist Andrew Cunningham reviewed the latest 21.5" iMac back in December, the computer sported an "Assembled in USA" badge on its foot. However, the 27" iMac I purchased and reviewed the same month still claimed to be "Assembled in China."

We first formally heard about Apple's domestic Mac manufacturing at the end of 2012 when Cook talked about the endeavor with NBC News and Bloomberg. As Apple Editor Emeritus Jacqui Cheng noted at the time, built-to-order iMacs have occasionally been assembled in the USA, but the "Assembled in USA" iMacs marked the first time that "US-assembled, standard-configuration machines have begun appearing in people's homes."

Of course, building Macs in the USA isn't a new idea: Apple spent $20 million in 1984 to build a Mac manufacturing plant in Fremont, California. The plant relied heavily on automation and was capable of churning out a pair of fully assembled Macs every minute. The comparatively high overheads of domestic manufacturing took their toll, however, and the plant only made Macs for a few years; it was shuttered entirely in 1992. Steve Jobs tried domestic manufacturing again with NeXT in the early 1990s, building a $10 million factory (also in Fremont) to make the absurdly expensive but surprisingly futuristic cube-shaped computers. This time both the factory and the company both proved unsuccessful.