- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
US can’t manufacture iPhones, but it can manufacture other things. That you can’t build Versaille overnight doesn’t mean you can’t plant a few flowers and lay one square stone.
I think SPARC CPUs were manufactured in the USA even in 00s.
The whole re-industrialization idea is good, people making something know it’s not magical and wonderful. That an ARM CPU in an iPhone is a relative of an MC in a toy, and that said MC’s internal structure can be grasped in an evening.
Worker jobs in manufacture affect societies very well. Just believing that this is going to happen means believing yet another US administration promising something until its term ends.
Which is what subsidies are for. Encourage companies to do the things you want, don’t destroy the economy by making everything else impractical lmao. I see what the end goal is, supposedly, it’s just an extremely stupid, naive, or outright malicious way of accomplishing it.
The taxes will continue until manufacturing improves.
Trump “saving” America from anything is pure fantasy true, and yet he got elected - TWICE. The fantasy of idiocracy is reality. Make people desperate enough for work by gutting minimum wage, Medicare, and everything else MAGA plans to do to create a feudal system, and the US becomes a cheap labor source to sell US-made iPhones and all kinds of other shit abroad. Either get used to that reality or figure out what to do about it.
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
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!
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…
Just because you can make phones with an army of cheap Chinese labour doesn’t mean that’s the only or best way. With suitable “design for manufacture”, pick and place robots like those used in PCB design could relatively easily be adopted to screw screws in where needed. Use plugs instead of those flat cable things, then the whole lot could be easily automated. Remove any aspect of the design that needs fingers and the whole process can be automated.
Wow what a great idea, I wonder why nobody else has ever thought about it.
TBH most of the cost is from the individual components. The core chip fab, the memory fab, the oled screen fab, the battery, power regulation, cameras, all massive operations and very automated. Not to speak of the software stack. Or the chip R&D and tape out costs.
The child labor is awful, but it’s not the most expensive part of a $1k+ iPhone.
The most expensive part of an iPhone is the >50% profit margin
An old chart:

I don’t doubt that it’s possible, but it would cost $7,000 or some shit.
not to mention one of the reasons we eagerly off-shored electronics fabrication in the first place is because it’s a toxic nightmare
Toxic as in workplace relations or toxic as in environmental effects? Or some other third meaning?
environmental effects
Fortune article last year just talked about water and power in just the chip sector: The chip industry’s dirty little secret: It’s very dirty
“At Intel’s Arizona campus, where the new facilities are still unfinished, the company already emits about two tons of hazardous air pollutants quarterly.”
Good thing Trump gives zero fucks about the climate and environment then /s
You get a Bhopal! And you get a Bhopal! Everyone gets a Bhopal!
Sucks to suck, buy used
Do they have tariffs on second hand goods from Asia being imported to sell to poor Americans who cant afford local?
the kicker will be when new-from-China plus 100% tariff is still cheaper than American made …
If it’s imported, there’s a tariff.
What if the ‘used’ run out?
By that time it will be the new world order…
You will have bigger issues to worry about lol
Repair, smuggle, Jerry rig

Yes, I can hear you Clem Fandango
Steven
They already tried “made in America” Apple products and they did not sell! Americans don’t want to pay $5K for an iPhone when they can pay 80% less for one made in China.
Ok but what if they cannot pay 80% less for one made in China?
What? They do. Apple sells tens of millions of iPhones each year in the US.
They did past tense. How about with a 140%+ tariff?
They’ll make iPhones in India. Which is actually what they are doing right now. Or in Vietnam. Or Ethiopia. You can’t tariff everyone 140% if you want your economy to work.
Haha as if that will stop Trump
What if you dont want your economy to work?
Well that sucks but they sure as hell won’t be able to buy one “made in America” either. The raw materials for batteries alone would have tariffs on them as well. Unless we have massive amounts of cobalt, lithium, copper, silicon, cadmium, etc, to be able to produce these items domestically, working class and middle class Americans will not be able to afford them.
My phone came from Samsung, who doesn’t use Chinese slave child labor. So this whole idea is pretty insane to me. You iPhone people don’t give a shit. Stop pretending.
A post this dumb is almost certainly trolling, but in case you’re actually serious about bragging your phone was made in a Vietnamese sweatshop instead of a Chinese one, maybe you should read the news more: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/was-your-smartphone-built-in-a-sweatshop/
Where do you think Samsung phones are made and by whom?
Mostly by Indian and Vietnamese slave labor: https://www.androidauthority.com/where-are-samsung-phones-made-3251712/
Most of the people interested in this as US liberals who are tied to their Apple devices and have very little knowledge of much else.
The simple idea of it just enables more grift.
Don’t be so negative. By 2035, a 2500 dollar us made iPhone might be possible.
Because of the child laborers making 85 cents an hour?
Inflation
That would make building a $2500 iPhone in the US even more difficult.
We already have foldables in that price range.
I’m genuinely surprised Trump killed the CHIPS act, when he could’ve let that roll through and taken credit for it as the whole POINT of that was to improve US manufacturing.
Also reintroduce the build back better with whatever re-branding.
If he were truly interested in american manufacturing he’d have gone all in on these.
But no. he wants company owners and worldl eaders to come to him and beg for exemptions.
deleted by creator
As a European I fully support comrade Trump in his successful endeavor of destroying the imperialist and fascist US state.
Do you have the phrase “out of the frying pan and into the fire” in Europe?
that doesn’t apply.
It’s better to distance ourselves from them before we get caught in their dumpster fire and also get burned.And how do you plan on doing that today? You are also delusional like Trump if you think you can just cut ties and happily watch US go up in flames. That simply isn’t gonna happen, certainly not before his current term ends.
It can happen pretty fast, look what Russia did with those sactions.
The EU, their neighbour, simply got replaced.
We can certainly do the same with the US.The USSR was not thoroughly embedded in the world economies. Nor did it have as staunch of allies in major positions in EU government as the US does today. Don’t get me wrong, despite being in the US, I do think that countries divesting and becoming less dependent upon a slave state, like the US, is a good thing. However, as the “Great Recession” demonstrated, EU economies are very much entangled with the US economy, with few lessons seeming to have been learned in the last decade and a half.
Sure, the US might be more impacted, but the EU will not be unscathed, if there isn’t more effort to decouple and ditch neoliberal policies. That kind of stuff can’t happen overnight.
The EU is not as detached from global economics as you seem to believe it is. The fall of the US will have world wide implications, for many generations.
The EU is not as detached from global economics as you seem to believe it is
I never said that, but it needs to be done.
We need to cut ties before they drag us down further.
Our economy is already going to shit with the high energy prices caused by them blowing up Nordstream.
And that was under Genocide Joe.
I would rather have an incompetent moron in charge of the country seeing us as vasals since forever.
And if it’s up to them they will gladly see us all at war again like WW2.
Their competition destroying themselves while they benefit and sell arms.Fuck that whole country
Don’t talk nonsense. Trump will destroy America and take Europe down the same path if he gets the chance.
The breakdown of trust in the Atlantic alliance alone is one of the worst things that could have happened to both sides and this is just the beginning. They’re going to fuck themselves and they’re going to fuck us in the process.
I hope our EU government get some sense and stop acting like the vasals they are.
This could be the push we need.
The US never were our friends and this ‘alliance’ is nothing more than being in their sphere of influence and serving their interests. Bcs they are losing power in the world they are now canibalising their own side.
Who said ‘there will be no more Nordstream’?
And then in a pure act of terror blew it up forcing us to buy 8x more expensive US fracking gas.
Not one peep from our sell-out leaders.
We needed to drop this horrible country long time ago, regardless of Trump.
Eh, I think it’s more that Trump wants attention. The CHIPS act is bad because Biden gets credit for it, not Trump. Tariffs are good because Trump gets to force other countries to come to the US to negotiate with him. Whether the deal at the end is good or bad is irrelevant, what matters is that Trump’s name is in the news and attached to those deals.
Trump isn’t going to jail, so I highly doubt he cares much about avoiding it. He mostly cares about people talking about him, and it’s working.
I think Musk is the same way, but he does seem to care about the tech his name is attached to as well. So that’s likely to cause huge issues soon as Musk and Trump butt heads more and more.
I’m surprised that people like you are still surprised at what Trump does.
Understanding Trump is simple: he’s a narcissist. For example, if the CHIPS act succeeds, Biden gets credit, so it’s bad. It’s really quite simple.
And what is THAT supposed to be?
I’ve been screaming about the republicans since they made it clear they were going for pure obstructionism with Obama.
Trump is a personality cult. It’s not rational and whatever. It’s about him and always has been.
just when i thought he couldn’t idiot any harder - he pours on the coal. Fucking scam artist.
The beautiful clean coal.
Everyone playing along that this is some kind of genuine policy play are just buying into Trump as a legitimate leader in a similar way to how MAGA-heads do. Trump does not give a fuck about American manufacturing, American jobs, onshoring, offshoring, none of that. It’s all a grift. He’s waiting for some kind of payoff here, be it in the form of countries giving in to bad deals for the Trump Organization or investing in Truth or $TRMP. In some cases he gets to be feted at state dinners and sign some watered down, meaningless “trade deal,” temporarily backfilling his deep insecurities. Enough of this and most of the tariffs evaporate.
That’s just how the media work unfortunately. They keep explaining how tariffs work to people that know it while MAGA voters post ‘Fuck Biden’ over and over on twitter.




















