this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Of course it is. They want 1500 bucks for something with a few hundred dollars of overhead. R and d not withstanding they'll want the same amount of profit for the phone if it's made in America and profits have to increase year after year! They can't make a little less profit they have to make more than before!
it's not just acost the issue, there's not enough skilled people to actually build them.
Industrial engineers, people that would be willing to assemble devices would be in short supply
If you offer good pay and good benefits at a decent working environment people will flock to assembly lines in the US. Christ they were basically invented here.
However unemployment figures suggest that would be impossible to do in practice.
No. No it doesn't.
There are 7.1 million people unemployed in the US officially. Realistically that number is probably much, much higher.
You're saying apple can't hire a few hundred people to work on an assembly line?
That's ~4% that is typically considered low but even if it wasn't.
It's not one assembly line, and one product only... it's every component from the chips to the glass, screen, circuit board and then the final one on.
You would need also experienced people in every part you would need to manufacture including engineers that are in short supply, an nevermind building the factories etc...
If Apple were forced by law to manufacture iPhones exclusively in the U.S., they wouldn't go under they'd adapt. They have the money (~$54B in liquidity), the brand loyalty, and the organizational muscle to pull it off.
There are ~7 million unemployed people in the U.S. plenty of potential labor, especially if Apple funds large-scale training and leans hard into automation. Would it be expensive? Absolutely. Costs would skyrocket. You're probably looking at a $1,800–$2,000 iPhone. But guess what? People would still buy it.
They’d need 5–10 years to fully build out fabs, assembly plants, and domestic supply chains, but it’s feasible. TSMC is already building fabs in Arizona. Apple would just have to scale that approach to the rest of the production ecosystem.
Forced U.S. iPhone manufacturing wouldn’t kill Apple. It’d just make them the biggest American manufacturer since WWII.
The issue is like for every other major corporation in this country is that they're just cheap bastards.
I work in the repair industry and what I tell all my clients when I do warranty work for them if it's the difference between repairing their item or the CEO of the warranty company getting a new yacht it's always going to be the yacht first.
As someone who has done a bunch of phone repairs with the help of YouTube, assembly isn't that hard. If they don't want to assemble them here, it's completely about profit margins. We should be taking steps to reduce that profit margin. Tax the rich and all that.
China uses little kids to build them. If we did the same in the US, America s would want to have MORE CHILDREN because they would literally pay for themselves!
Just imagine if all middle schools in the US required 2 hours of iPhone assembly per day. It would be excellent industrial training for the future generation!
Meh, once they grow up their things aren't nimble enough to assemble stuff any more. Waste of energy training them.