Trump, Supposedly, Thinks the U.S. Has the ‘Resources’ Needed to Make iPhones

Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac:

Ahead of that, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said today that Trump firmly believes that Apple can move iPhone manufacturing to the United States. In response to a question from Maggie Haberman of The New York Times about the types of jobs Trump hopes to create in the U.S. with these tariffs, Leavitt said:

“The president wants to increase manufacturing jobs here in the United States of America, but he’s also looking at advanced technologies. He’s also looking at AI and emerging fields that are growing around the world that the United States needs to be a leader in as well. There’s an array of diverse jobs. More traditional manufacturing jobs, and also jobs in advanced technologies. The president is looking at all of those. He wants them to come back home.”

Haberman followed up with a question about iPhone manufacturing specifically, asking whether Trump thinks this is “the kind of technology” that could move to the United States. Leavitt responded:

“[Trump] believes we have the labor, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it. As you know, Apple has invested $500 billion here in the United States. So, if Apple didn’t think the United States could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change.”

Leavitt is referencing Apple’s announcement from February, when it said it would “spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years.” Apple’s commitment, however, made zero reference to iPhone assembly in the United States. The press release focused on R&D in the U.S., chip production in Arizona, AI server manufacturing in Houston, Apple TV+ production, and an academy in Michigan.

Also worth reading today is this story from 404 Media, which outlines exactly why an iPhone made in the U.S. is “pure fantasy.”

Another way to think about it is that the iPhone — the iPhone as we know it — can’t really be made anywhere else but China. Apple doesn’t publicly state how many iPhones are made in which countries — shocker that they’d be secretive about that — but estimates peg annual production as being 85–90 percent in China, 10 percent in India, and the remainder in Brazil and Vietnam. Wages aren’t even close to the biggest reason for this. Ultimately the biggest unique factor to the Chinese supply chain is scale. Foxconn’s iPhone factories in China aren’t mere buildings and aren’t really even campuses — they’re more like entire cities unto themselves.

We can joke about US-made iPhones costing $9,000 but the jokes miss the point. If the world were such that all iPhones sold to Americans were made in America, there’s no plausible scenario where iPhone ownership would be commonplace. Let’s estimate that Apple sells 50 million iPhones per year in the US. Apple couldn’t manufacture 50 million iPhones per year in the US at any cost. No amount of money could be thrown at the problem and make it happen that 50 million new iPhones are made in the US in the near future. Apple could make some iPhones here, but not many. And however many they might make would be built using components (displays, chips) that would have to be imported anyway.

Even if Apple were to dramatically raise the price of an iPhone, and even if, somehow, demand for iPhones didn’t drop in the face of dramatically higher prices, Apple simply couldn’t make tens of millions of iPhones here in the US. But of course demand would drop precipitously in the face of higher prices. And a gray market would instantly rise. Because even if Apple, magically, were able to build tens of millions of iPhones in the US, they’d still be building hundreds of millions of them in China — and those Chinese-assembled ones would cost less. I’m imagining an entire cottage industry of bootleggers running Chinese-made iPhones from Canada into the US, and instead of buying iPhones from an Apple Store, people will buy them from the backs of U-Haul trucks. (Gray market bootlegging is inevitable with these tariffs, for every sort of product. If something is cheaper in Canada than it is in the US, someone’s going to smuggle it across the border.)

There simply is no scenario where 50 million Americans per year buy an iPhone for prices they’d be willing to pay without most of them being manufactured by the Chinese supply chain Apple has built.

★ Wednesday, 9 April 2025