Apple Claims 2 Million Jobs Created Across 50 U.S. States - MacRumors
Skip to Content

Apple Claims 2 Million Jobs Created Across 50 U.S. States

by

Apple updated its website on Wednesday with U.S. job creation numbers from 2016, revealing that the company has generated a total of 2 million jobs across all 50 states.

Last year saw Apple spend more than $50 billion with 9,000 U.S. suppliers and manufacturers, and create around 90,000 supplier and manufacturer jobs, bringing the total number to 450,000 jobs, up from 361,000 in 2015. Meanwhile the number of people directly employed by Apple rose to 80,000, up from 76,000 in the previous year.

Screen Shot 1 1
Across the U.S., 29 cities are home to at least 250 Apple employees, while 44 states have an Apple Store. Apple says it has seen a 28x increase in employment outside of California since 2000, with a 1,500 percent growth in U.S. employees as a whole since 1998.

Software-wise, Apple states that 1,530,000 U.S. jobs could be linked to the App Store ecosystem, an increase of 130,000 from 2015. U.S. developers were said to have earned $16 billion from sales since the App Store was launched in 2008.

The dedicated web page also provides a state-by-state breakdown of the above figures and highlights some of Apple's major U.S. investments, including its Cupertino headquarters, data centers in North Carolina, Oregon, and Reno, and campuses in Arizona and Texas.

The website changes come on the same day CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple is creating a new $1 billion fund for advanced manufacturing, in a further effort to promote U.S. job creation.

Top Rated Comments

118 months ago
I create jobs too! Tons of jobs linked to me!

I buy food.
I **** in the toilet. The infrastructure and it runs to the wate disposal plant.
I take the train to work!
Eat prepared food!
Throw out garbage, more jobs!

Im a job creator!
Score: 20 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Rogifan Avatar
118 months ago
What's the source for this 2M figure? Apple buys glass from Corning therefore anyone who works at Corning is a job created because of Apple? Seriously?
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
smacrumon Avatar
118 months ago
The "statistics" on Apple's website are complete rubbish! Apple can't claim 1.53 million US jobs as their own creation.

99% of those “US jobs attributable to the App Store ecosystem” are casual/part time, self made developers struggling to make a cent. These individuals were also already coding and writing apps well before Apple came along.

Apple needs to provide a full breakdown of App Store profits, and who is making the total sum of the profits. I’d argue 99% of those in the Apple Store ecosystem are making less than 1% of the profits.

Complete utter rubbish. All Apple can claim is 80k direct Apple employees, that’s it. If Apple wants to talk supplier employees, then let’s get real and talk about 1 million employees at Apple’s offshore Chinese and other overseas factories. That's where the majority of Apple's employees work if we're talking about "jobs attributable" and other such nonsense.

The clues to the truth is actually found in what Apple omits and does not include in the discussion. Apple lies to customers so much it’s disgraceful. The stats on Apple's website are completely flimsy and the production of an ametuer marketing team. The stats completely discredit the Apple brand, they are totally bogus.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ILikeAllOS Avatar
118 months ago
Oh please MacRumors, can you bring back the down vote option.
Why would you want to downvote him anyway?
He's right.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
simonmet Avatar
118 months ago
I don't for a second believe 1.5 million people in the US earn their living through the App Store and the App Store alone. App Store earnings are heavily skewed to the largest and most profitable developers. Most will earn a moderate amount of pocket money at best.

This is pretty blatant spin even for Apple. I'd like to see a Fact Checker take on their claim. I'm sure it would score "highly dubious" if not "blatantly false".

And Apple claim they want to combat alternative facts? How about they start combatting their own?

Often games are ported to iOS relatively quickly and easily because of engines like Unity. So does that mean income from those apps created those jobs and if so how does Apple estimate how many? The page contains no information on how they came up with this estimate. No doubt a very liberal and superficial approach was taken to their employment estimates, if not plucking a number out of thin air to make nice and impressive sounding 2 million figure. If this was a scholarly article it would be laughed at and thrown in the bin.

The thing is, half a million jobs isn't bad at all. Pretty god-damned impressive actually. Why the need even to inflate it to 2 million? Half a million real jobs is way better than reporting 2 million of which three-quarters are indirect/maybe/possibly jobs. Then there's the nearly half a million "supplier jobs" they say they created too. I wonder how they audited that!

It's beyond arrogant of Apple to say they created the jobs of these developers or suppliers. Indirectly enabled some no doubt but not created.

This is marketing PR meant to lobby Washington. Nothing more.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
RichTF Avatar
118 months ago
I create jobs too! Tons of jobs linked to me!
Complete utter rubbish. All Apple can claim is 80k direct Apple employees, that’s it. If Apple wants to talk supplier employees, then let’s get real and talk about 1 million employees at Apple’s offshore Chinese and other overseas factories. That's where the majority of Apple's employees work if we're talking about "jobs attributable" and other such nonsense.
What's the source for this 2M figure? Apple buys glass from Corning therefore anyone who works at Corning is a job created because of Apple? Seriously?
If you go to their webpage and actually read it, they do provide sources for these numbers. Admittedly I lack the economics background to validate them personally, but the footnote for "suppliers" includes this:
Analysis Group analyzed Apple’s impact on the U.S. job market and economy by using information on the total amount Apple spent on goods and services in the U.S. in 2016, and applying that information to Type-1 employment multipliers developed by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
Which, to me, sounds like it's based on the amount they spend with those suppliers, so they're not just assuming that every single employee job there has been "created" by Apple. Anyone with a more economics-y background able to shed more light on this?

It's fine to have a go at Apple for just making up nonsense if that's what they're actually doing, but you should at least read the information they're making available first. C'mon people — this is a perfect example of the sort of automatic knee-jerk Apple-bashing and negativity that people here complain about!
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Popular Stories

Four iPhone 18 Pro Colors Mock Feature

iPhone 18 Pro Launching Later This Year With These 10 New Features

Tuesday May 26, 2026 6:32 am PDT by
While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are not launching until September, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices. It was initially reported that the iPhone 18 Pro models would have fully under-screen Face ID, with only a front camera visible in the top-left corner of the screen. However, the latest rumors indicate that only one Face ID component will be moved under the...
Apple Watch Ultra 2 Black Titanium

watchOS 27 Will Add These New Features to Your Apple Watch

Sunday May 24, 2026 11:53 am PDT by
Apple will unveil watchOS 27 during its WWDC 2026 keynote on Monday, June 8, and a handful of new features have been rumored already. The first developer beta of watchOS 27 should be available immediately following the keynote, and a public beta typically follows in July. The update should be released to all users with a compatible Apple Watch model in September. Below, we recap watchOS...
iPhone 15 General Feature Green

Apple Preparing 'Most Significant Overhaul in the iPhone's History'

Friday May 22, 2026 1:36 pm PDT by
Apple reportedly plans to unveil its first foldable iPhone in September this year — it may be named "iPhone Ultra" — and expectations are high. In his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said the foldable iPhone will be "the most significant overhaul in the iPhone's history." "iPhone 4, iPhone 6 and iPhone X were clearly a big deal, but this is a whole new design," he said....