This is a worker-centered analysis of Apple, the world’s most profitable corporation, and its primary supplier, with more than one million workers in China alone, the world’s largest industrial employer, Foxconn. Apple’s commercial triumph rests not only on its design and marketing supremacy but on the reversal of its original business model from producing computers to outsourcing its entire consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at multiple sites from coastal to inland, we examine the interface of Apple, Foxconn, the Chinese state, and the unions. The power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed as these play out for Chinese workers in an epoch of fundamental class transformation from the predominance of state owned enterprises to a workforce that is overwhelmingly comprised of rural migrant workers. The analysis of incomplete proletarianization and the emergence of a new form of precarious labor is central to the story. Power asymmetries, including technological control and global marketing, assure the dominance of Apple in price setting and the timing of product delivery, resulting in intense pressures and illegal overtime for workers. In the wake of a wave of suicides at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen in 2010, we studied labor practice, living conditions and patterns of resistance at Foxconn and other factories, centering on two generations of rural migrant workers in a period in which contentious social protest has grown exponentially: in a system that is fully unionized (company union), in which strikes and autonomous unions are illegal, and in which the state actively seeks to redirect conflict from worker protest to the courts. We consider the paradox of worker power and powerlessness at the interface of a system in transition from predominantly state owned enterprise with lifetime employment for urban workers to one in which large areas of the state sector have been privatized and in which a partially proletarianized rural migrant workforce, whose numbers are approaching 300 million but who lack fundamental labor and citizenship rights, constitute the core of the contemporary working class and its most volatile segment.