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Bank of America: US-Made iPhones Would Face 90% Cost Surge
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That's the Chinese made version not the US made one. The Liberty Phone is $2000 as you noted after that and is basically the same phone with a few spec tweaks.
Marginally different specs aside, the Liberty Phone has been ~ 2x the price of the Chinese made version of the same for a while which I think gives some idea of how much it would cost to make a phone in the US. Apple could probably gain some economies of scale but then would face some competition for resources for years as it scaled up.
Agree it would likely cost 2x. Though I think the US could get there in 5 years if it tried. There would have to be certainty in the payoff to get the necessary level of investment. Chaos leads to uncertainty which freezes decision making and therefore investment.
I’m not a shareholder, but I do work with. Chinese manufacturing in a similar industry, and your guess is hilariously wrong. There are single components inthere that costs more than that, at millions of units.
But yes you CAN make a “copy” using different components, for 50 bucks. But there’s a reason I put “copy” in quotes…
many think he is God...God can do many things, like decrease the size of a "Gallon".
You got it backwards. What is happening right now is China standing up to Trump’s incoherent rambling. Which is great, since the EU clearly doesn’t have the balls to do it. Unfortunately what I’m seeing is a unique opportunity to take over the leadership of the world. China is latching on with both hands, while EU’s hands are wringing.
That’s one problem.
That’s one more problem.
“Hope” is not how you run a country.
And the ultimate joke is that it's not just factories and vast infrastructure that would need to be built. It's also a question of trained workforce - which Trump's immigration policy won't let you poach from abroad. It's much more complicated than "just assemble it on the US soil".
And yet they can manufacture in India and Vietnam
Cost is only part of the problem. Apple needs scale, too. Sure, wrangling a couple thousand ppl to produce a million iPhones per year (from foreign parts) might be doable, but Apple sells something like 300 million iPhones a year, a significant portion of that (maybe 30-40%) in the US. China has industrial zones where they can throw tens or hundreds of thousands of ppl at this problem. The US doesn’t - and it’s not even a matter of time. Just think: how many Metropolitan Statistical Areas have 100k qualified and potentially available workers to do this? Not counting the fact that you still need people working in city infrastructure (schools, police, trash, etc), retail infrastructure, professional services infrastructure, etc. I’d be surprised if there are any areas outside the dozen biggest US cities that can support that many people working on one thing, and wages in those areas aren’t going to be cheap.
Additionally, while labor rates are lower in China, these factory jobs are considered desireable. I remember reading that every time Apple ramped up production, there would be lines around the block for people trying to get the newly available positions. Can you imagine thousands of people lining up for $20/hr factory jobs here?
Additionally, while labor rates are lower in China, these factory jobs are considered desireable. I remember reading that every time Apple ramped up production, there would be lines around the block for people trying to get the newly available positions. Can you imagine thousands of people lining up for $20/hr factory jobs here?
Because those countries are filled with the skilled manufacturing and tooling engineers Tim says he needs. /s
I'm thankful I live in country that allows us to make comments like this.
They're already being tariffed though. 125% from China and 10% from the other countries.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/09/trump-announces-90-day-tariff-pause-for-at-least-some-countries.html
- President Donald Trump dropped new tariff rates on imports from most U.S. trade partners to 10% for 90 days to allow trade negotiations with those countries.
- Trump announced the pause hours after goods from nearly 90 nations became subject to stiffer, so-called reciprocal tariffs imposed by the United States.
- The president also said in a social media post that he was raising the tariffs imposed on imports from China to 125% “effective immediately” due to the “lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets.”
Correction: China's tariffs are actually 145%... 125% + prior 20% tariffs.
U.S. tariffs on China now total 145% after latest hike, White House says
The U.S. tariff rate on Chinese imports now effectively totals 145%, a White House official confirmed to CNBC.
Trump’s latest executive order hikes tariffs on Beijing to 125% from 84%.
But that comes on top of a 20% fentanyl-related tariff that Trump previously imposed on China.
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Sending kids to college so they can learn how to put in screws in an iPhone. 😂So it's either a new iPhone or your kid's college education.
The parts are all made in U.S. The raw materials may be a different story though.
Librem 5 USA – Purism
shop.puri.sm
Librem 5 USA, a premium version of the Librem 5 phone that focuses on security by design and privacy protection by default with a secure supply chain and electronics Made in USA
Made in USA Electronics
All the electronics of the Liberty Phone is made in our USA facility, and the entire phone is assembled in the USA, using the same manufacturing process we used for the Librem 5 devkits in 2018 and Librem Key made in the USA in 2019. By doing all electronics fabrication within the boundaries of our facility Purism can oversee each stage of the production.
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Bingo. Globalization and "free" trade was an exchange of the American worker for corporate profits/greed. The decimated small towns across America are the casualties of war. Prices never went down in the 80s/90s/etc., only profits went up. Whether or not any serious amount of manufacturing can be returned to the US remains to be seen, however we saw how vulnerable we are to relying on an adversary for production back in 2020.
Higher education is being eliminated. Enjoy the new iPhone.So it's either a new iPhone or your kid's college education.
So people with enough common sense and use reason, logic and research who say trump is setting the world on fire (as though the stock market wasn't a big enough sign that there's a fire) have TDS? What is a person with blind faith to a man who lies to them day-in and day-out and only cares about himself called?
I get the cost argument for why iPhones aren't made in the US, but is the other option to make them across an ocean in a country we have an adversarial relationship with? One that's not respecting our copyright and brand infringement. Like what are we making as a county? What are we producing? Another janky app that lets b2b do b2b stuff? Does the world need that? Like the biggest problem as a society is that we're disconnected from reality. Reality is the world doesn't need a social media coordinator or a brand consulting group to spend millions on a report about your brand's value proposition. We need to make things, we need to do things, we need an economic system as if survival mattered.
1) If gas is down it’s because oil prices have fallen due to forecasting of lower demand resulting from a tRump-induced recession
2) Grocery prices are up and already pricing in tariffs
3) I guarantee you’ll care about corporate earnings when a recession hits and you loose your job to a robot