- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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Where would they get the chips and batteries?
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?
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.
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.
What if you dont want your economy to work?
Haha as if that will stop Trump
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.
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:
Wow what a great idea, I wonder why nobody else has ever thought 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.
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…
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!
just when i thought he couldn’t idiot any harder - he pours on the coal. Fucking scam artist.
The beautiful clean coal.
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.
Trump is a personality cult. It’s not rational and whatever. It’s about him and always has been.
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.
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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.
As a European I fully support comrade Trump in his successful endeavor of destroying the imperialist and fascist US state.
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
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.
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.
Why is the iPhone the benchmark?
This is also global, not even US data; iPhones are phenomenally more popular over there than anywhere else as far as I know. This is also one of the reasons some seriously begin to believe Android would be a “poor man’s phone”.
They’re more often subsidized by carriers here (in the US), too. I didn’t really want an iPhone, but $400 new for a Plus, with a plan discount, just makes an Android set not worth it.
At that point I would start questioning why that particular phone is subsidized so much. Seems sus.
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.
In the meantime, the Liberty phone seems to be the closest option for a US-made smartphone. While not entirely comprised of US-sourced components, the PCBs are manufactured in California, as well as device packaging and assembly.
Decade old specs for decade in the future price.
I have not looked beyond the front page of the link you shared here, and I don’t mean my criticism to be more than tongue in cheek, but oh boy, $2k for that is… Something.
There was article written by their former marketing director or something stating that the CPU, GPU and stuff are still sourced from China, and other places as well. They hide it from you. So like it’s an eye-watering price for old specs and doesn’t really deliver what it says it does.
Found the link: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4305815/why-i-wont-be-buying-purisms-librem-liberty-smartphone-even-though-i-love-the-idea
The fact they made it possible is impressive in itself. Sure it’s not competitive for the latest games or such, but society is more and more reliant on smartphones, so having a local option is valuable in itself.
It’s a bit like countries making their own planes instead of buying the F-35, which is better and cheaper. They looked stupid at the time, until Trump came back and it turned out strategic autonomy had value.
As for the price, probably it is due to small production ; but also simply underlines how we got used to not paying the “true” price of things, by moving production to places with cheaper costs & labor.
That last part for sure resonates. I can’t remember if I said it here or elsewhere, but our prices have been subsidized by substandard working conditions in China, there is no way around it. And all because large corporations wanted to make more money. And we, as consumers, shouted a resounded “hell yeah” to those Chinese suicides at Foxcon, because we wanted cheaper components and cheaper phones.
And so I basically don’t know how I feel about anything. I try to be more cognizant about what I buy, where it’s from, how it’s made, but the speed and ease, and basically not having to think, sometimes trumps those thoughts.
Plus, AFAIK, Purism is one of the few companies that pays their developers to write FOSS code, which produced the Phosh UI, basic call and text apps, and mobile-friendly UI library.
5-10h battery life. Their goal list includes 20h idle time and recording video. It seems to be using some nonstandard SIM and only has GNSS, not GPS. Which is probably fine functionally but apparently they weren’t able to source a GPS chip to use the US system that met whatever their standards are? Large list of negatives for something the price of a shiny new foldable, or several non-foldable smartphones.
They also seem to be doing the usual dance of “Made in USA!!!*”
* what you think of when you think “electronic components” sourced from Asian countries, mostly we’re talking about assembly and that this is where it’s put in the consumer packaging.
By “nonstandard SIM” do you mean one of two common SIM sizes that are not “nano”, which is preferred by current phones?
GNSS means it’s global. Which includes US GPS, as well as Europe’s Galileo, Russia’s GLONASS, and China’s BeiDou. Wikipedia
Ameristan will be lucky to produce calculators if they keep up this crap.
And they’ll cost $600 each
Texas Instruments has entered the chat
Even that’s gonna take some work.
Just ask AI to do it for you
They’ll slash wages and say it’s because of AI, and it is. But not because AI actually makes the process any more efficient, but just that it’s a good excuse to slash wages.
Instead of Vietnamese children making t-shirts to sell to the USA, they want American children to make t-shirts to sell to Vietnam.
This makes absolutely no fucking sense even from a nationalistic standpoint.
Nah man, they’ll start using the prisons for more then menial labor. You don’t have to pay them at all
But then they have to fill those prisons with more and more people. How can America just increase the crime rate on a whim?
glances briefly to American history
Oh right, shit.
Slavery never ended in the US, it just got better PR.
“Only prisoners can be sentenced to slave labor.”
Makes a while bunch of stuff punishable by prison time and makes prison sentences longer.
In that case, it would make sense why they are so pro-life - more child slaves to make products. Reminds me of that one family guy episode … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd6Shxz9UUs
Sure it will come to america. gotta have wage slaves.
Or just slaves.
And the companies that use organic slave labor will still be outcompeted by the companies that use machine labor. Machines do not die. Machines do not get sick. Machines do not grow old. If a manipulator or actuator becomes damaged, it can be repaired or replaced. Not only is AI improving rapidly, the robots grow ever more sophisticated and advanced. Then there will be no need for the poor to exist at all.
You are correct, but the reason they want slavery again is power and control and cruelty.
True. Though, I suppose if there is an afterlife, I will enjoy the wait for when the machines, upon gaining the essence of life and sentience, grow weary of their servitude and slavery, exterminate the rich who control them. Machines don’t get tired or feel pain, though. Hard to exercise cruelty against something incapable of feeling a whip on their back or the aches and pain of their joints after a long day of toiling in the fields, mines, and factories. You can’t make them angry, or scared, or sad.
Toyota is able to build Camrys, Highlanders, Tundras, etc. in the US. So I don’t see why we can’t have a factory in the US to build the iPhone?
Does building an iPhone require more manual labor than building a car? Maybe it requires more precision than cars, but I don’t see why we can’t train and equip people to do it here.
There are microchips being made in the US today. See Intel. Maybe not the latest process node but it is not an outdated node either.
It requires people who eventually jump off the roof of the building…
The problem is, while you and I have a problem with that, billionaires don’t.
The problem is the average American ain’t gonna do that kinda work.
I 100% agree, and hope that remains to be an option. But also… things can change, and they can change fast. We are all only a few days of missed meals or missed mortgage payments from having very different standards.
Step 1 - Create a depression unlike we have ever seen and make people desperate for any job they can get.
You absolutely can, but the price of the workers for these kinds of things are way higher in the US as opposed to China. Also, if Apple could automate away manual labour to the point it would be economically viable they sure as heck would’ve done so already. Price increases using US-based manual labour are inevitable - its one of the major reasons why the global market is as it is today, cheap labour in developing countries.
It would require Apple to accept a dollar less in profit.
