Apple’s success over the past decade has in a large measure been the product of some unglamorous but essential business and manufacturing developments: offshoring of its production and mastering of the global supply chain management. Unfortunately, as it has become quite clear over the past five or six years this strategic move was not without its long-term downsides. Many of the Apple’s partners used this partnership opportunity to master some of the technologies and business strategies developed by Apple and use them to a great effect to produce their own products.

Consequently, Apple has been trying to greatly reduce its dependance on its powerful business partners. Disentangling, however has not been easy. Last Summer Apple has finally pulled the plug on Google Maps and replaced it with its own mapping software. The result has been a short term disaster. The new mapping service was far from being ready for primetime, and definitely had not lead to the kind of smooth user experience which Apple prides itself on.

The disentanglement  in hardware has so far been even harder to do. Only this month did Apple finally pull away from Samsung in manufacturing of microchips. It is still to be determined how well do the new chips perform, as their production is not slated to commence until 2014, and may take it even longer for them to make their way into Apple’s products.

In the long run Apple may decide to take control over the entire production process, as it did in the early days of its existence. The US semiconductor industry is far behind its Asian rivals right now, and it’s hard to see any major changes there any time soon. However, Apple’s latest high-end computers – Mac Pro – is proudly promoted as designed AND manufactured in the US. This might be a harbinger of things to come in the upcoming decade or so.