The White House is insisting that Donald Trump’s vision of Apple’s flagship iPhones being manufactured in the US will come to fruition, despite assertions from analysts and the company itself that it would not be possible.
The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters during Tuesday’s briefing that the president believed Apple’s recently announced $500bn investment, as well as increasing import costs sparked by his trade tariffs, would encourage the company to ramp up manufacturing in the US.
“He believes we have the labor, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it. If Apple didn’t think the US could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change,” she said.
The profit is going to come from somewhere. Currently, it’s underpaying Chinese and Indian peoples in slave like conditions. Americans either have to be working those conditions (See inmate slave labor, republican drive to put kids to work), immigrants that republicans are trying to inhumanely deport, or the most impossible of them all: a company making a little less profit.
company making a little less profit.
Got to be careful, shit like this will put you on a list.
Or - profits stay the same and products are just more expensive (way more likely scenario).
Do you want a $30,000 iPhone? Cause this is how you got a $30,000 iPhone.
30 people will need to share one iPhone, it could work /s 😂
One iPhone, located centrally in each town within a booth for easy use. Maybe there can be a system to collect a tiny payment for using it to offset the price?
Sure, but just cut out that avocado toast in the morning. It’ll be fine. /s
Of course, this must mean that the minimum wage will increase by an equal percentage, right?
Right?
Purism has a “Made in the USA” version of their phone.
It costs ~3x what their regular phone costs.
Motorola for a hot minute made the OG Moto X in America. If it was really such a desired thing, people would have bought it in droves. (It was a really GOOD phone too.) Instead, Motorola the wireless brand is now owned by Chinese Lenovo.
They’ve already started moving production to India and Vietnam to avoid China tariffs, but moving to the US is definitely unviable regardless.
I don’t know how anybody can plan for anything the way flip flopping Trump changes his mind every week.
They can’t, that’s part of why the stock market is in free fall.
My plan is simple: every time he does something stupid, I do more drugs! I end up doing a lot of drugs.
dont know where people are getting the idea that this would make the iphone outrageously more expensive. iphones are already pretty much the phone with the highest profit margin, 54% on the iphone 14max. adding to that, the pay for the average foxconn worker in china isnt as low compared to the minimum wage in most us states as one might imagine, with around 2.80$ compared to 7.25$ minimum wage. its pretty bad, but they arent paid cents per hour. lastly, labor isnt exactly whats expensive about the iphone anyway.
looking at all these numbers, it seems entirely plausible for apple to manufacture iphones in the us while barely raising the price.
besides that, these comments also come off as a defense of sweatshop work. im sure thats not the intent, but you gotta ask yourself what it sounds like when you mock the idea of work being done by (more) reasonably paid people, because it would make your already overpriced toy more expensive. i get that dunking on trump is fun, but this a really weird angle.
You raise good points, but even if Apple was able to take some hit on the profit margin, and was able to find cheap-ish labor in the US (minimum wage likely higher than $7.25/hr though), the biggest issue in my opinion is that all the component the iPhone is made of are still imported and affected by tariffs, and making them in the US might be outright impossible for some, based on current manufacturing capabilities, or very expensive for the ones that can be made in US.
Last I saw it was reported around 17 hours per phone on labor. They won’t get away with less than $20/hr plus benefits here. So that’s around $22.50/hr. ~$380 of labor per phone just on construction. Every individual part/material will have to pay a tariff coming into the country as well unless you are going to make those here as well at the higher costs. 100% of their profit margins would be eaten up. So there are 2 options, raise the price by 50% to keep their profits, or exploit cheap labor elsewhere. They made their choice to move to India previously and India faces a 27% tariff. They keep their profits higher and prices lower by not moving manufacturing of the phone here.
Even then, they moved some of their iPhone operations to India, and they had to scale back plans because the Indian workforce doesn’t have the skills needed to perform the work, and getting a made in India iPhone is pretty much a marker of getting a lemon. Significantly lower quality control, significantly higher tolerance for defects.
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I’m not sure how much of their profit margin Apple would give up. It depends on how much phone sales slow down when prices go up. Is the cell phone market elastic or inelastic?
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The labor is 2.5x more expensive than minimum wage. Do you think Apple will have minimum wage workers doing relatively skilled labor like soldering and assembling electronics? I’ll likely be more in the $15-$20/hour range before even looking at benefits. I don’t know how many person hours go into assembling a phone, but it’s not just a few. That alone would probably add a few hundred to every phone.
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Like you said, the most expensive portion is not the labor, it’s the parts that are mostly sourced from China and Taiwan… which have huge tariffs in the scenario Trump is talking about.
Regarding the labor costs, consider that you can go work in an Amazon warehouse and make ~$22 an hour for essentially unskilled labor.
Maybe working on an American Foxconn plant would be more desirable (I have my doubts) but I still couldn’t see the labor cost being less than $25/hr at a bare minimum
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these comments also come off as a defense of sweatshop work…what it sounds like when you mock the idea of work being done by (more) reasonably paid people
You mean children. There are already children working in meat packing plants, also in automotive assembly, and elsewhere. We only hear about the companies that got caught and paid the little fine to go back to doing it.
America’s future to do the jobs that left long ago will be to have children, prisoners, any of the downtrodden handling the manufacture. Similar to how crop harvesting will be handled in the more-near future as all the immigrants are sent away to a hole. Labor shortage? Well, a new random crime just surfaced to resupply the work camps. Perhaps people with “gang” tattoos.
If it were to happen, it’s not going to be some magic utopia with Joe High School grad walking into the assembly plant post-WWII and buying 2 houses, a boat, and providing for a family of four. It will be just as bad as China, or worse, and “at home.” America’s Golden Shower Age isn’t coming back.
No matter who makes it, it’s still going to suck for them, until these processes are fully automated and no human is making them.
Is any of it right? No. Can we solve it? Sure, stop buying iPhones, stop being a consumer, buy the bare minimum, stop buying into retail culture. Vote people into office that care about fair labor practices across the country. There are shitty jobs that pay handsomely, oil rig work, industrial fishing, people make a lot of money doing very life-threatening work. It is completely possible these jobs could exist and pay well, but the consumer masses will balk at the cost.
More so, in the lens of right now, not gonna happen. America will be lucky to be a Democracy in a year’s time.
Yeah this whole defending cheap foreign labor thing feels kind of weird to me. I might just be showing my ignorance here, but isn’t the end-game for globalization about raising living standards around the world? By trading with developing countries, the investment develops their middle class and eventually their wages should catch up with ours.
It feels weird to see people saying that so much of the American economy is suddenly unviable when we have to pay livable wages. If that’s the case, that’s a bad thing, and it should change. Not that I think these tariffs are the solution.
As I understand it, these sweatshop jobs do resist the standard of living in the areas they are in. The people there don’t have the option to work a job that we would consider good. They work the job we consider terrible, and they get paid more than they would doing other jobs.
To make a moral judgement, we must balance between “terrible working conditions, no protections, maximum wealth extraction,” on the one hand, and “no infrastructure, no job, no money” on the other. Sadly, there is no profit in making the world better for everyone.
Lol … $1,000 iPhone is made possible by hiring cheap labor that isn’t possible in the US.
They’ll probably try to use prison labor as sweatshop to do the work but churn out poorly assembled products that will still cost double.
As someone who has seen first hand the quality of work coming out of prison slave labor, I can say it’s not great. Huge surprise, I know.
It’s like they can’t come to terms with the way life is and that they might not be the center of everyone’s world. My 5yo has the same problem. Tomorrow doesn’t seem to exist for him, he thinks anything he wants to have he should have because he wants it, doesn’t believe in giving, even to kids he calls “friends” at school, some of something he has and needs it all himself, and getting him to be quiet for a few min while having a conversation with anyone but him will result in him relentlessly trying to get our attention. Oh, and a lot of the stuff he wants to do makes no sense and sometimes goes completely against the laws that govern matter.
Our society is being driven off a cliff by people who have the same mentality as a child who hasn’t learned to share. Grown ass mother fuckers, with no empathy or understanding of their insignificance in the universe, so they go scorched-Earth to get their way. It would be fucking pathetic if there wasn’t so much on the line.
There are a lot of philosophical questions that this whole situation brings up. They’re not new questions, people have been pondering and theorizing for a long time on these matters, but I think they remain uncertain. What is the end result of wealth and economic development? Where does it end, where does it take a society, and the world?
The US was a manufacturing superpower. Those manufacturing jobs lifted a lot of people out of poverty and into the middle class. Average wealth and living standards increased significantly. Then things stagnated, and those manufacturing jobs moved to other countries where people were poorer and thus willing to accept lower wages than the American workers. The US transitioned from a manufacturing economy to a consumer economy.
The manufacturing jobs were replaced with service jobs. Now, instead of working in a factory you worked in a retail store, or a customer support center, or for a financial institution, or a software company, etc. All well and good, I suppose, but it was still stagnation for a lot of people. Many people stopped getting wealthier and their living standards stopped improving. Some people did get much, much wealthier, but many others actually started getting poorer.
So, where do we go from here? Trump thinks we just need to bring back the manufacturing jobs and that will fix everything, and he’s not alone. Many people, across the political spectrum, think that’s the solution. But, I don’t think it is. Don’t get me wrong, a good manufacturing job is a god send for someone who needs the work and for whom the job will improve their economic situation, but for the rest of us, and I think that’s most of us, it doesn’t mean much. So, what does? More desk jobs?
I think that once you reach a high enough level of economic development, your goals change. It’s no longer about getting out of poverty, it’s about something else: freedom. I think people ultimately want freedom. Freedom to pursue the things that bring them joy and fulfillment. But, how? Because people also want security and a decent standard of living. A hobo might be “free” in many ways, but he’s not free from poverty. So how can we be free, to pursue the things that bring us joy, while also having a good place to live and raise a family, in safe, clean neighborhoods, a good education, and healthcare, etc? How? Or, are those two things mutually exclusive? It seems to me, the only way you can have both freedom and security is to be independently wealthy, but that’s just not possible for everyone. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible for the majority of people. So, what? Where do we go from here?
How? By taxing the shit out of the wealthy.
There should be no billionaires. Period. If someone created something so insanely valuable that they actually earned a billion, then awesome for them. They can still have $999 million and be better off than 99.999% of the world. Most people who have over a billion got that money through screwing over people and exploitation. They don’t deserve to have more than a billion. Nobody needs more than a billion, and I can’t think of anyone who has actually earned it.
The next step is targeting the way wealthy people get wealthier. Tax assets instead above some number of millions instead of just income and capitol gains. Change the way corporate officers are paid and how boards of directors are made up of other corporate officers all voting for each other to get higher salaries. I’m not smart enough to come up with a way to attack the profits made by exploiting cheap labor in other markets, but maybe something like a global minimum wage that lifts up workers in other countries while not giving CEOs as much incentive to do it.
Finally, I would go after housing costs. I would ban corporations from owning single family housing and place a HUGE tax on individuals owning more than 3 homes (with moderate taxes on more than 1 home, then a higher tax on the 3rd home, then a ridiculous tax on the 4th). Limiting foreign ownership would also help out.
I’m not smart enough to come up with a way to attack the profits made by exploiting cheap labor in other markets, but maybe something like a global minimum wage that lifts up workers in other countries while not giving CEOs as much incentive to do it.
I haven’t heard this idea before and I really like it. You want to have your product manufactured by minimum wage workers in Cambodia? Sure, go ahead. But you’ll be paying them the minimum wage from your business’ home country, not theirs, and then paying shipping afterward to move your items to the sale location so it doesn’t actually benefit the business to abuse sweatshop labor rates.
I wouldn’t want us making iPhones. We don’t do manufacturing anymore and don’t have the capability. That chapter is behind us now. It’s how a globalized technologically-advanced future works.
Eventually the build process for most things will be fully automated and no humans will be building them.
A easy thing to ask for when you are completely ignorant of how things work.
Yes, they can be US made, at what cost, $5k per phone?
They could make them in the US for 1000 and sell for 1500, but they’d rather build them for 300 in China and sell it for 1300 here.
The numbers are whatever, but I’m trying to make a point. Apple had like a trillion in cash because they exploit others. They could be just incredibly wealthy and pay decent wages, but they’ll never happen
They will still want the same profit. So profit when made outside US is 1k and phone cost 1.3k according to your example. Cost of living and basic necessities is extremely cheap overseas, so they accept lower wages.
If it costs a ridiculous 1k to make in the US under terrible work conditions and stupid high cos of living and eggs, add the 1k profit leads to a 2k phone to make in US.
At such prices, I would just travel to Mexico and get a version made outside US. In this way, I save rich Americans from terrible work conditions in US and get a cheap phone, support poor families overseas, and even raise them out of poverty with my spending. India and china raised millions out of poverty due to my spending.
