A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy

Good luck getting all the materials needed for that now that China has stopped exports to the US.
IPhone 17:
- Physical keys and what looks like a headphone jack? Seems like an upgrade
  
  Replacable battery, I bet
- Only $4000 for the entry model. That's how much it costs once the tariffs on the semiconductors that you simply cannot produce in the country for at least 10 more years even if you tried has been covered, the salaries high enough to motivate people to willingly work the assembly lines now that immigrant workers are gone, and the markup needed to cover the cost of completely creating an entire supply chain from scratch as well as paying back the insane debt that results from the outrageous high risk investments this would require and that frankly no investor would want to touch with a 10 foot pole.
  
  That is before Apple levels of profit added on, right? Otherwise that seems a bit low.
- That would be the first iPhone I'd actually buy.
  
  $76.999 price will surely stop you.
- If they slap an Apple logo on it the gullible sheep would buy it anyway.
- Don’t threaten me with a good time.
  I’d looooove a return of the brick phone. Modern phones feel small and dainty in my giant hands. Meanwhile, battery life absolutely sucks. I’d love a modern brick phone that does calls, text and nothing else. And a battery life of a fulm week.
  
  Had a Sony Ericsson W580i back in high school. It was a slide phone. 15 hours talk, 570 hours standby. That’s nearly 24 days of standby. I charged it maybe every two weeks. It was tiny(So not great in your hands I guess). We don’t need unwieldy huge phones for good battery life. Still had a basic browser and was part of the ‘Sony Walkman’ lineup so was a decent enough music player. Modern phones are just power hungry cause they have about ~12x the power of my first desktop computer.
  Crap photo but shows many angles.
  
  I’ll take my Motorola Razr back from the early 00s.
  Whether I do Captain Kirk impressions with it in the privacy of my own home is my business…

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.
- He wants to get rid of everything associated with bEYEden and also wants to stick it to CHAIna.
- I'm not surprised.
  The name of the game here is to destroy America, not build it up. (Russia wants a USSR-style fall of America. The Cold War never ended for them.) And Trump wants to stay out of jail. Everything you see Trump or his admin doing can be attributed to those two things. Destroying America, or keeping himself out of Jail.
  
  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.
- 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.
- Even if he had gone all in on manufacturing, it's not like a supply network of industrial goods can be built in a day. Hell, it's hard to build that in a 4-year term. Trump is virtue signalling while at the same time jeopardizing any chance America had of reshoring.
  It's honestly infuriating me how big projects needed to improve our infrastructure take years and years to complete, when from one administration to the next, those same projects can be cancelled.
  It takes multiple presidencies to build something good, and it takes one to tear it all down.
  I see now the benefits of China's 5 year plans with how well organized they can control their economy.
- I'd have to look into it more, but my gut tells me the CHIPS act & 'Build Back Better' was filled to the brim with pork & bullshit. You'd have to parse through, line by line, and take out all the shit. And hope all the changes get passed & implemented, and of course you're still touting the worthless name of a project that your people hate that you didn't even create. Or just blindly trust your opponent's judgment calls & let it roll through, based on "just trust me, bro". Nooooo thank you. Why bother?
  With stuff like this, it tends to be easier & more expedient to take it behind the shed & shoot it. Replace it with your distinctly different, branded equivalent.
  However. If this is true, it appears that Trump didn't fully raze the CHIPS act & merely revamped it, is taking credit for it. Like you said. CHIPS must have been pretty true to cause.
  
  Oh I'm sure there was pork there, but to just dismissi t out of hand is kinda disengenouls especially when all the politicians (mostly republican) that voted against it tried snapping up credit come time for the ribbon cutting and new construction to aged infrastructure.
  Granted Manchan and Senna opposed the build back better initiative and both were explicitely paid off by fossil fuel industry wonks... And i figure if they're in opposition, 'I want it even more out of sheer fucking spite to you greedy assholes that make money killing the planet my niece is going to have to live in.'

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
- We already have foldables in that price range.

They are promising to gut the CHIPS Act which would be needed to even think about doing this.
- Can't have a Biden law. Biden introduced that so it must be bad for the US.
  
  I ran into this at work today. Proposed a very simple approach for something to an architect and an engineering lead. Engineering lead said this was a practical solution that solves a problem that's been plaguing them for two years. The architect nearly immediately said, "well, the real source is a mainframe that was stood up in the very early 80s. Let's ignore the fact that changing it takes an act of Congress or that we have multiple modern downstream systems between it and us that are a much better home for this new function."
  It really seemed to amount to, "I didn't come up with this, therefore I don't support it."
  Ah, corporate politics.
- Apple tried this in the past. Who knew making special little screws was way more expensive to make in the US. Kind of sucks when you outsource all of your manufacturing ...
  
  Kind of sucks when you outsource all of your manufacturing …
  It's kind of awesome for everyone if you don't piss off your trading partners. It happens in the first place because it's better for everyone involved! It's a consensual arrangement that parties only engage in because it is in their interests.
  
  The only silver lining I see to the tariffs is that it could end up sticking it to all these large corporations who fought hard to move operations out of the US, to places they knew couldn't meet US worker standards, in order to save money. Obviously, US consumers will feel the pain, but we've been buying products subsidized by Chinese suicides in Foxcon factories, and so perhaps it's a comeuppance.
  Disclaimer: I don't know what's going on.

Maybe if wages actually rose with productivity, Americans could actually afford goods made within the United States.
- It’s not even about wages. The precision tooling and engineering equipment would probably take a decade of development to get the US equivalent with China. We just don’t have it here.
  And it’s not about rising wages with productivity. Americans by and large don’t want to work in factories or manufacturing. The pay would have to be astronomical to fill the needed positions.
  
  The pay WOULD be astronomical if it had kept pace with CEOs, that's the point
- wouldn't higher wages make stuff cost more? I'm kinda confused
  
  The sheer amount of money being removed by the 1 percent is regoddamndiculous. It's something like 45 trillion dollars since wages diverged from productivity in 1975.
  
  CEO pay can mitigate that if they're willing to make less.
  
  In a "frictionless vacuum", yes. Real world economics is much more complex however and higher wages = higher product prices doesn't quite hold true. Read productivity-pay gap.
  
  That's one of the issues with how we've (most western capitalist countries) been doing this.
  People are struggling for money so minimum wage goes up. Labour to create things is now more expensive and prices go up.
  There is only one solution and that's to theoretically (or technically) eating the rich that are hoarding all of the wealth.

Its looking more and more like the end result is just going to be millions of Americans will have to do without, Live with less.
and no doubt at the same time their oligarch fantasy-wealthy overlords will preach to them about Spartan values or something. Ultranationalist Jingo Ghouls will talk about how its tough times create strong men, or about how we all have to prepare for war with China or something.
- Soon we can translate all the GDR jokes and use them for the US.
- will preach to them about Spartan values or something
  Spartans kinda invented separation of branches of power. Not all bad things.
  But since they were a slave-holding polity, where actual citizens of Sparta were the occupiers and the helot population hated them with passion, that didn't last for too long.
  Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR, you can trace the ideas and how it was built architecturally, didn't work too well. Of the "layers of citizenry" too, their workers turned into poets, their warriors turned into slaves, and their philosophers turned into thieves.
  USA in any case just can't be that, not in this century.
  
  Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR
  ???
  You are going to really have to expand on the argument there.
- Spartan values would be accurate given that it was a slave state with something like 7 to 10 helots per Spartan. And yet 300 has turned King Leonidas into a legendary hero... for defending a slave state. Human perspective is too malleable.
- Its looking more and more like the end result is just going to be millions of Americans will have to do without, Live with less.
  Phones are the de facto platform for two factor authentication of everything; I don't see how society is going to walk backwards to phones being an optional luxury item.
  
  the market will be taken over by cheaper, less "luxury" alternatives.
- They are fine on their island hideouts on Martha's Vineyard and gated forts in Florida

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.
- 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

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.”

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.

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.
  
  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!

As a global company, Apple could just re-establish itself in europe, e.g. Ireland, and continue trading with China, they can just put the US on hold for a couple of years.
Meanwhile for those who really addicted to istuff, coyotes can smuggle iphones across the border, so maybe this solves the fentanyl 'issue'.
- The people addicted to apple products will just buy it even with a 100%+ tariff. To them it's a status thing.
  
  The Galaxy S series and the Pixel devices cost about the same tbh, with some of the foldable models being particularly expensive. Buying way too much phone isn't exclusive to Apple users. Apple is just clever by not really providing an entry-level priced phone. It's both a scumbag move to make more money, but also a way to make sure that inferior devices providing an inferior experience don't ruin their rep.
  
  While I don't doubt this, I'm also sure that tarrifs will also affect the pricing/availability of utility (non-status symbol) mobile devices.
  We are going to have to deal with this for 4 years (unless some Rs will vote the remove in 2) and recovery won't be immediate. I hope my current mobile lasts that long, but I usually only get about 3 years out of a battery. Replacement parts will be hit by tarrifs, too.
- This is actually one of the best solutions to this problem I've seen this whole time. Expand it to include all affected US companies. What's she point of being a global company, if you can't leverage your globalized nature for your advantage?
  
  Also shows how much they actually can’t or won’t leave based just on just a (much needed) tax increase.
- But it's a bitch to strap them on a coyote and get it go where you want it to go. Oh coyote as in a smuggler not the 4 legged canine type
  
  Yeah, but you just gave me an idea too, how about AI-directed canines? "apple-intelligence" applied to follow-your-nose. My dog loves to chase small spots of light, which might be a trick to steer them.
- coyotes can smuggle iphones across the border
  Aaaaand the US is the new North Korea...
  
  Indeed it seems Trump picked up some ideas about "Juche" (national self-reliance?) from his best buddy "rocket-man".
- Apple already has an entity in Ireland which is the one that has most of the money. Google as well. When I pay my Google cloud bills, I don't pay the us business, but a separate EU incorporated business. So I think, if apple sells to Europe, none of the iPhones or iPhone parts have to go through the US or pay any tarrifs.
  
  And if chinese buy iphones, do they now have to pay 84% tariff? - maybe HQ in europe solves that too?
- Hehe that is funny, sadly I think the US is Apples biggest market, so they probably wouldn't want to let go and give up any marketshare.
  US usually is the most important market for most (international) companies I believe.
  
  US has only 4% of the world's population, there are now plenty of super-rich in China, India, etc. who like to flaunt i-stuff.
- Let me check if my silicon dealer can hook you up...
- In that case the EU will have to tax them proper.

Probably not a fantasy, but it's gonna cost like 3k bucks lmao
- Bold of you to assume that Trump and Company won't put the average American to work for almost nothing. The planned economic recession is to convince the people to do so.
  The new generation of American children will not spend most of their time studying in school, but rather working in factories for a handful of peanuts. That's Trump's America.
  
  Prison labor, that's the answer. They'll just start making the prisons into actual factories
  
  Foxcon nets to catch jumpers in the US when?
- China has a lot more leverage to increase this price. Export tariffs on US listed companies to US, and perhaps to countries that choose to further increase sycophancy to US empire. Prevent US manufacturing with more export controls.
  The problem with decades of propaganda/smearing is that too many people believe it. Bessent yesterday said "They only have a pair of 2s" as cards. No one in the room has not been programmed to "repeat that China is on brink of collapse for all of the last 20 years". Hitler couldn't win war because generals had to be loyal to every syphilis inspired thought of the dotard.
- shouldn't affect sales though because apple fanboys will sell their grandmother to buy the latest ~~status symbol~~ phone

Why? All those kids are going to need something to do after they tear down the education system.
- But their tubby little fingers aren't nimble enough nor can they hold their attention span nor take basic instructions, so they can't be employed for production unlike their healthier and more dutiful same aged Asian counterparts
  
  They won't be making iphones, they will be mining the minerals for them.
  
  They won't be tubby for long. Food about to get expensive. Timmy about to be on a fucking diet.
- They'll have their hands full extracting the lithium from the dead Tesla batteries.
- Something I've been thinking about is how schools are affected by population decline. Schools take a lot of infrastructure, labor and money. It seems like hardly anyone in my generation is having kids. So what happens to this expensive school system when there's too few students to justify the costs?
  Will it simply disintegrate into private schooling like olden times?
  
  Well if it's funded by taxes they can scale down. That's the nice thing about everyone chipping in. If less is needed just take less. It's not like a business that needs to turn a profit.

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.

iPhone about to cost $5000
iPhone 17: Patriots-Only Edition
- The Trump base will blame Obama/Biden/Clinton, I guarantee it.
  It must be so freeing to live a life more divorced from logic or reality than an indoor dog.
  Maybe eliminating natural selection was a mistake.
  
  The year is 2039, life is hard.
  Just used the last of the clean water, food is almost unobtainable.
  "Thanks Obama"

people screwing in little, little screws
it’s going to be automated
Sure that's not automated yet?
- Everything's computer!
- Nope, I've long worked in designing for North American electronics manufacturing, it's still manual. We just outsource as many of those sub assemblies as possible to cheaper countries and design things with as few fasteners as possible.
  That really is the least of the worries, there just isn't the manufacturing infrastructure for all the raw material and individual parts, manufacturing those parts just isn't feasible to do at a reasonable cost or schedule outside of Asia. China is still popular not due to cost, they are no longer cheapest, but because they have the infrastructure in place.
- Apparently jobs like that, which require fine motor skills, are extremely difficult to automate.
  
  Use the same cameras and AI that Musk said were gonna fully automate Tesla
  
  Weird. Not like pcb fabs haven't been doing that for ages. And not necessarily the solder flood type chip mounts either.

This guy just spews his bullshit, Would it be nice if they could be made in United States? Yeah sure but the thing is an iPhone would cost like $3500. And I know damn straight I’m not paying that much for a phone. And I’m pretty sure you guys wouldn’t either and that’s coming from someone that sometimes makes some stupid financial decisions and that is not one I would make
- If Apple didn't try to make 400% markup on their underpowered trash, it would probably just cost what it costs now. Except the child slave labor part would go away.
  
  Except the child slave labor part would go away.
  That’s the neat part, the republicans are trying to repeal child labor laws.
  
  underpowered trash
  I hate to say it, but it's actually quite powerful trash that they produce.
  
  My almost five year old piece of under powered apple trash cost me less than 45 US cents a day, still has regular OS updates and works between eight to ten hours most days running my entire life. I might even splurge out and buy a new one if they ever release an overpowered non trash handset…
- I mean I would pay a premium for a made in America phone. Probably about 2 times as much. Iphones just suck ass so I'd never pay for one at all

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.

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

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.

- Yes, I can hear you Clem Fandango
  
  Steven

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.
April 10 update: Right on time, the author of the OP's linked article has now published an article on the Liberty phone.
- 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.
  
  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.

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.

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.

I don't doubt that it's possible, but it would cost $7,000 or some shit.

just when i thought he couldn't idiot any harder - he pours on the coal. Fucking scam artist.
- The beautiful clean coal.

Why is the iPhone the benchmark?
- Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2024/05/06/global-top-10-best-selling-smartphones-all-from-apple-samsung/
  
  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".
  
  Yes but when it comes to OS share, Android completely dominates.

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?
  
  Repair, smuggle, Jerry rig
  
  By that time it will be the new world order...
  You will have bigger issues to worry about lol

Just give us about 30 or so years

Tim Cook and Donald Trump = Tim Crook

Where would they get the chips and batteries?
- Probably just lean super heavily on Taiwan, and Taiwan is also pledging to build a chip factory in the US. Georgia area, IIRC.
  Batteries fucking suck. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em....but they're always saying we're on the cusp of an exciting new battery technology. Lately, they're touting the idea of better, more efficient sodium batteries with all organic components.
  While obviously it has a ways to go to reach working parity with lithium, there are also some big pros when it comes to safety & the ridiculous availability of sodium. If we can switch to sodium batteries, China takes a fucking massive hit.
  
  I thought it was Arizona that the Taiwanese company was building in.
  It’s actually interesting as a sort of exception-proving-the-rule because with the chip factory they discovered they simply couldn’t run its creation without having a bunch of skilled workers come over from Taiwan. which in turn caused culture shock/clash issues between the Taiwanese and American workers.
  
  I also hate batteries. Batteries suck.

Watch out for the leopard!

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.
- If that were possible they would have already done that, since it's cheaper to fully automate everything in the long run than to have humans involved in any part of the manufacturing process. No matter how cheap you get the labor automation will still beat it out, unless they are literal slaves, and even then the quality of work probably won't be as good as an automated system, so it still might not be economically sensible.
- 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:

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.
- 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.