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Apple pays $5 per manufactured iPhone in China. Around $8-$10 in India. There’s no reason that it couldn’t be made for $40 in the USA.

It’s mostly machines making these things. Yes there’s talent, but AAPL isn’t willing to pay anyone except its executives. The executives take in hundreds of millions per year in stock alone. Everyone gets screwed. China, Apple employees, and every stakeholders who isn’t a shareholder. Tim cares about his buddies and his shareholders.

All the CEOs who shipped the jobs outside the USA to make money did it due to greed not because the USA couldn’t manufacture it. The military and the contractors can make stealth bombers but they couldn’t make an iPhone in the USA? Give me a break. Tim is a Crook and so are all the politicians and CEOs!

Putting aside the absurd proposition that an iPhone costs Apple $5 (as tough as that is), your numbers mean Apple’s costs have risen 8x. How exactly do you expect American consumers to afford that?
 
They could also do it across the border in Mexico if that's the case, thing is, the 10% only rate for Brazil could change at any moment, Trump's policies are completely unpredictable, he can pick a fight with Brazil tomorrow for being part of BRICS (he has already threaten BRICS before) and slap a 100% tariff on Brazilian exports...

Remember when Trump threatened Spain with tariffs because he thought the S in BRICS was for them instead of South Africa? The man is dumb, and he and those who opted for him are not serious people.
 
Karoline Leavitt is Trump’s attack dog. She is rude, arrogant and aggressive. I really don’t like her.

She and her boss seem to forget that Apple already employ many thousands of people in America and pay substantial corporate taxes in the US.

She’s the right person for the job like any good and competent (PR) propaganda mouthpiece. All presidents, politicians and CEOs hire these kind of people.
 
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A well-known story:




The CNN Business article continued to make the point:

A government official standing at a podium telling a reporter how Apple is supposed to conduct its business on a whim is so appalling and absurd. I don’t even know what the Hell this administration is doing other than taking command control of the US economy without precedent or pulling allocated funds approved by legislator (isn’t the office of the President withholding for international aid, grants to education instructions, etc?).

Good thing the US has an immovable limbo of student loans, and the US Department of Education was/is getting shuttered by this administration.
 
I’m sure they thought of it but it’s an expensive endeavor requires lots of R&D. Maybe these tariffs are the ultimate incentive to do that. I can't imagine Apple paying 2 to 3X what they used to pay a Chinese or an Indian worker and also keep the same price.

Or, more likely, it isn’t possible and some steps need to be done by hand.
 
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This is a problem with his 'bring back manufacturing' to america:
No one will want those poverty paying, tedious, long hour jobs.

Apple will have to automate the process.
 
The US is already struggling to find workers for the advanced manufacturing sites it is already building/has


Where are they going to find the workforce for the rest of the electronics manufacturing industry with any reshoring?!
Since this is exactly my field, TSMC was asking that all workers go live in Taiwan for 9-12 months for training right as China was sending warships playing chicken with them.
It was a tough sell for recruiters, but there are plenty of skilled semiconductor workers in the US. Samsung laid off a bunch last year, and XMP (formerly Freescale, Formerly Motorola) did too. That is just Austin.
 
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I'm expecting Trump to give Apple billions to build new factories, train and how trends of thousands of people, and pay their salaries. And do this all in the next month.

Dumbo has a brain the size of a mosquito.
It's the company's responsibility to train workers. There's no college course on how to assemble an iPhone or build a car.
 
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Let's fire everybody from their jobs here on MacRumors. We can find people in India, China, Poland, ... who can do your job cheaper than you easily.

If American workers cost too much to make iPhone's, well, we can make that same argument about your job.
You don't need to speak English to do manufacturing. Writing isn't quite the same thing.
 
Have you ever been on an electronics assembly line, or are you one of those former infectious disease “experts” who is suddenly now an electronics supply chain/manufacturing “expert”?

Besides all of that, if Apple could automate iPhone manufacturing 100%, how would it benefit the U.S. economy to perform that manufacturing in the U.S.?
People also don't understand that something like the iPhone takes a small city of factories to create. It's taken Apple 4ish years to move some production to Vietnam.
 
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Have you ever been on an electronics assembly line, or are you one of those former infectious disease “experts” who is suddenly now an electronics supply chain/manufacturing “expert”?

Besides all of that, if Apple could automate iPhone manufacturing 100%, how would it benefit the U.S. economy to perform that manufacturing in the U.S.?

You're saying I'm an expert but I am not. It's an idea maybe too futuristic like in sci-fi shows but I don't see why it's impossible. Unless of course a government socialistic approach, imposing a minimum number of human workers per factory. Either way it'll be made in the U.S.A. made by robots or humans.
 
Our country is trillions and trillions in debt. That damage was done long ago.
Recent decades still contributed a lot:

1744144591918.png

(from https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and-percentage-7371225)
 

People don't take you seriously when you post easily debunked tripe, FWIW.

What Trump literally said (taken from the transcript in the Snopes article you linked) is the following:

And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you're going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.

Which he later walked back, and then, a day later he tried to say he was being sarcastic. Seems like a good topic and location for sarcasm 🤔 (or, just a possibility, in the ensuing day he was told how crazy what he said was and resorted to the old "no I was just joking" approach).

So yeah, it's only "easily debunked tripe" if you ignore what he actually said.
 
Tim Cook supported fascism by donating $1 million to Donald Trump's inauguration. So Apple customers who are Cook supporters and Trump supporters deserve all the financial hardships they receive as a result of Trump's policies.
But what about Elon and Tesla?
Meanwhile that same guy keeps banging on about how unfair it is that Europeans don’t buy US cars. Anyone who has been to Europe and looked at the roads (and the parking spaces) understands completely why Europeans have no interest in these cars - they are not designed with them in mind at all. And yet he keeps on and on and on about it, implying that it’s some grand anti-American conspiracy.
He just (kind of) doubled down on that fixation by accusing the Japanese too of not buying American cars.
 
This from the same "genius" that said his sharpie pen could change the course of a hurricane and that inhaling bleach would be a fix for COVID.

Does Trump have factories in the US? I wonder if his Trump Trash merch will still be made in China and if they are exempt from tariffs?
Correction: he did not suggest inhaling bleach would be a fix for COVID. He said 'injecting'. Please do not spread misinformation.
 
MR: “Despite Trump's suggestion that Apple could shift its incredibly complex supply chain to the U.S., it would be next to impossible.”

That’s not exactly correct. It would be extraordinarily complicated, expensive, and time consuming for Apple (and ultimately very expensive for US consumers), but it would certainly not be “impossible.”
So you’re just going to ignore the “next to” part, that you yourself highlighted?
 
Yes, I am sure that you know quite a lot more about the needs of manufacturing iPhones than the current CEO of Apple who was previously in supply chain management at said company.
Well, he said in the same article that Chinese labor is not cheap compared to the US, and we have already covered that $2.90 / hour is normal at Foxconn for those workers. That is significantly less than US Federal minimum wage (and more so when talking about skilled labor like this - expect something closer to $18-$20/hour).

Now I am sure Tim Cook knows all this. I am sure he is a smart guy. That does not make him honest about this.

Also, how many hours of labor does it take workers to assemble the phone. So there is a large part of this that is automated, but there are some manual parts to it. Are people working on the phone for 1 hour or 2? 15?
If it is 1 hour total manual labor, that is a ~$15 price increase per phone. If it is 10 hours, it is ~$150 in labor more.
 
Why would we even want to move these jobs to the United States? Who reads articles about poor working conditions in the factories assembling iPhones and thinks, oh man, this is the job I want for me and my children one day!

I sympathize with the workers overseas that work in such conditions, but I'm in no rush to replicate them here. Trump, Vance, and others have a romantic image of manufacturing that doesn't reflect reality.
 
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