Idiocy or Jackassery, You Make the Call: Tripp Mickle on Whether Trump’s ‘Made in America’ iPhone Is a Fantasy

Saturday, 24 May 2025

The New York Times ran a really dumb Tripp Mickle piece yesterday under the headline “Is Trump’s ‘Made in America’ iPhone a Fantasy?” The answer should have simply been “Yes, it’s sheer fantasy”, perhaps with explanations why. Instead, Mickle twists the piece into pretzels to make it seem like the answer is maybe, even though there’s not a single fact to back that up. Not one. The only thing that backs up any answer other than “It’s a fantasy, can’t happen, makes no sense” are comments from analysts — named and unnamed — and the bizarre old-school news media practice of treating as fact any nonsense and/or bullshit that comes out of the lips of anyone with the world “analyst” on their business card.

Could Apple make iPhones in the United States?

Yes. Apple could make iPhones in the United States. But doing so would be expensive and difficult and force the company to more than double iPhone prices to $2,000 or more, said Wayne Lam, an analyst with TechInsights, a market research firm. Apple would have to buy new machines and rely on more automation than it uses in China because the U.S. population is so much smaller, Mr. Lam said.

This is nonsense. The problem isn’t that China has a higher population than the US (about 1.4 billion vs. 340 million, about a 4× difference). Foxconn employs somewhere between 300–500,000 assembly line workers in China doing final assembly for Apple products. It’s that the United States doesn’t have anyone with the necessary vocational skills, who would want to work tedious factory jobs at factory-job wages, and China does. That’s part of the fever-dream mad-king fantasy of this entire cockamamie endeavor by Trump: these are difficult, low-paying, long-houred jobs that Americans don’t want. That these jobs are all in China and India is proof that America is far ahead, not that we’ve fallen behind. (There are nuances to the overall dynamics, like the national security ramifications of our being reliant on Taiwan for leading-edge chip fabrication, but Trump’s tariff nonsense doesn’t address those issues.)

Worse: $2,000 is just a made-up number. Lam doesn’t even say which iPhone would cost $2,000. Would it be the iPhone 16 Pro Max (current starting price: $1,200) or the base model iPhone 16e (current price: $600)? Mickle reports that Lam is saying prices “would more than double” so let’s just say he’s talking about the regular no-adjective iPhone models. Today the iPhone 16 starts at $800. If assembling even some of them would result in a retail price of $2,000, Apple would sell none of them. Like, almost literally zero.

The math here takes a bit of thinking but it’s not complicated. Trump is claiming he’s going to apply 25% tariffs to India-made iPhones sold in the US.¹ If Apple passed along the entire 25% tariff on an $800 iPhone to consumers, that would raise the retail price to $1,000. So if stores carried two different iPhone 17 models — same specs, same colors — and one costs $1,000 because it was assembled in India or China, facing 25% Trump tariffs, and the other costs $2,000 because it was assembled in some sort of fantasy factory that somehow pops up in Texas between now and September, how many people would buy the $2,000 US-assembled one? Almost literally zero. So why even bother? Apple doesn’t even print the “Designed by Apple in California / Assembled in Wherever” small print on the outside of the iPhone any more.

Tariffs would have to be 250% for the price of an Indian- or Chinese-assembled $800 iPhone to get to $2,000. And even if Trump were to apply 250% tariffs to smartphones — which isn’t going to happen — it would be far easier for Apple to just sell Indian and Chinese-assembled iPhones for $2,000 than it would be to spin up assembly — factories, employees, training, components — here inside the US. So even though $2,000 is just a number “analyst” Wayne Lam just completely made up, and which reporter Tripp Mickle simply quotes as having any basis in reality, it still doesn’t make any sense that Apple would do it. No matter how crazily high tariffs go, it only makes sense for Apple to continue assembling iPhones in China and India for now, and passing some or all of the costs along to consumers.²

Of course, raising the price of a base model iPhone to $2,000 would crater consumer demand. And of course it would create a massive gray market bootlegging opportunity where hustlers would smuggle normal-cost iPhones into the US from Canada, Mexico, and overseas. Trump can’t raise the price of iPhones outside the US, and so long as iPhones are priced “normally” everywhere in the world, the higher Trump’s tariffs might go, the larger and more commonplace bootlegging them will be.

There would be some benefits to moving the supply chain, including reducing the environmental costs of shipping products from abroad, said Matthew Moore, who spent nine years as a manufacturing design manager at Apple. But the upsides would be trivial compared with the challenges that would have to be overcome.

Again, just utter nonsense. There might be hypothetical environmental benefits to assembling all US-sold iPhones inside the US, but in the real world, many if not most of the most expensive components would still come from overseas. All iPhone displays come from Asian manufacturers. All A-series chips come from TSMC in Taiwan. (TSMC is building out a chip-fabrication campus in Arizona but even if that goes according to plan — which it isn’t — their Arizona fabrication capabilities will remain years behind their leading-edge fabrication technology in Taiwan for at least the next decade, and Apple’s A-series chips are fabbed exclusively on leading-edge technology.)

Supply chain experts say shifting iPhone production to the United States in 2025 would be foolish.

Perhaps the one accurate sentence in Mickle’s entire piece.

The iPhone is nearly 20 years old. Apple’s top executives have said people may not need an iPhone in 10 years because it could be replaced by a new device built for artificial intelligence. As a result, Apple would invest a lot of money that it wouldn’t be able to recoup, Mr. Lam said.

“I would be surprised if there’s an iPhone 29,” he said, noting that Apple is trying to disrupt the iPhone by making augmented reality products like the Vision Pro.

The Mac is 41 years old and, last I checked, Apple is still making them. I don’t know if Apple will keep naming iPhones with annually incrementing integers, but I’ll gladly wager Wayne Lam (or Tripp Mickle) any amount of money they wish that Apple will release at least one new iPhone in 2037. Name the wager, fellas. “The iPhone is 20 years old” is the dumbest argument in this entire dumb article.

What does China offer that the United States doesn’t?

Small hands, a massive, seasonal work force and millions of engineers. Young Chinese women have small fingers, and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said.

Well, now I have to eat my own words. “Young Chinese women have small fingers” is in fact the dumbest argument in this entire incredibly stupid article. It might even be the dumbest thing I’ve read this year, and with Trump in office, I’ve read a lot of dumb things. For chrissake I just read this morning that Trump claimed his administration is trying to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students because “A lot of the people need remedial math. These students can’t add two and two, and they go to Harvard. They want remedial math and they’re going to teach remedial math at Harvard?” That’s truly profoundly stupid.³ But it’s not as ignorant as saying that Chinese women’s finger-size is the reason Apple makes iPhones in China.

I’d pay good money to know the names of the “supply chain experts” (plural!) Mickle got this one from.