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A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy
Submitted 11 months ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.404media.co/a-us-made-iphone-is-pure-fantasy/
Comments
Alpha71@lemmy.world 11 months ago
T00l_shed@lemmy.world 11 months ago
AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
RabbitBBQ@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Just ask AI to do it for you
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
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.
KulunkelBoom@lemm.ee 11 months ago
just when i thought he couldn’t idiot any harder - he pours on the coal. Fucking scam artist.
craig9@lemm.ee 11 months ago
The beautiful clean coal.
rockhard@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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.
n_emoo@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Ok but what if they cannot pay 80% less for one made in China?
rockhard@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 11 months ago
What? They do. Apple sells tens of millions of iPhones each year in the US.
theotherbelow@lemmynsfw.com 11 months ago
Why is the iPhone the benchmark?
dryfter@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Psythik@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Yes but when it comes to OS share, Android completely dominates.
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
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”.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Don’t be so negative. By 2035, a 2500 dollar us made iPhone might be possible.
Psythik@lemm.ee 11 months ago
We already have foldables in that price range.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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!
supercriticalcheese@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
mechoman444@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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!
doingthestuff@lemy.lol 11 months ago
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.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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 striking down minimum wage laws, gutting Medicare, and everything else MAGA plans to do to create a feudal system, and the US becoming a cheap labor source to sell US-made iPhones and all kinds of other shit abroad becomes reality.
letsgo@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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 IDK why people think it’s the most expensive part of a $1k+ iPhone.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
The most expensive part of an iPhone is the >50% profit margin
InputZero@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Wow what a great idea, I wonder why nobody else has ever thought about it.
echodot@feddit.uk 11 months ago
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.
jcs@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
lobut@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
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: …locals.com/…/why-i-wont-be-buying-purisms-librem…
falcunculus@jlai.lu 11 months ago
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.
turmacar@lemmy.world 11 months ago
5-10h battery life. Their goal list includes 20h idle time and recording video.
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.
trumboner@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Nexz@feddit.nl 11 months ago
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.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It would require Apple to accept a dollar less in profit.
Dragomus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It requires people who eventually jump off the roof of the building…
trueheresy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
The problem is, while you and I have a problem with that, billionaires don’t.
Shardikprime@lemmy.world 11 months ago
So you people finally admit you want and need slave work to satisfy your petty desires?
Good, good! Baby steps
carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
They are promising to gut the CHIPS Act which would be needed to even think about doing this.
nthavoc@lemmy.today 11 months ago
Also 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 …
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
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.
Jyek@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Can’t have a Biden law. Biden introduced that so it must be bad for the US.
IMALlama@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Hismama@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Maybe if wages actually rose with productivity, Americans could actually afford goods made within the United States.
MisanthropiCynic@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
They pay WOULD be astronomical if it had kept pace with CEOs.
TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
wouldn’t higher wages make stuff cost more? I’m kinda confused
deepfuckingdumb@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The sheer amount of money being removed by the 1 percent is regoddamndiculius. It’s something like 45 trillion dollars since wages diverged from productivity in 1975.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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.
Pilferjinx@lemmy.world 11 months ago
CEO pay can mitigate that if they’re willing to make less.
IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
iPhone about to cost $5000
Allonzee@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
M0oP0o@mander.xyz 11 months ago
The year is 2039, life is hard.
Just used the last of the clean water, food is almost unobtainable.
“Thanks Obama”
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 11 months ago
Why? All those kids are going to need something to do after they tear down the education system.
CalipherJones@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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?
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 11 months ago
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.
Dasus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
They won’t be making iphones, they will be mining the minerals for them.
Alteon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They won’t be tubby for long. Food about to get expensive. Timmy about to be on a fucking diet.
dzsimbo@lemm.ee 11 months ago
They’ll have their hands full extracting the lithium from the dead Tesla batteries.
smokingpistol@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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
Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
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
ikidd@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If Apple didn’t try to make 400% markup on their underpowered trash, it would probably just cost what it costs now.
Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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…
Belgdore@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Except the child slave labor part would go away.
That’s the neat part, the republicans are trying to repeal child labor laws.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I hate to say it, but it’s actually quite powerful trash that they produce.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
StJohnMcCrae@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
The taxes will continue until manufacturing improves.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Just give us about 30 or so years
DicJacobus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Its looking more and more like the end result is just going to be millions of Americans will have to do without,
and no doubt at the same time their oligarch fantasy-wealthy overlords will preach to them about Spartan values or something.
CalipherJones@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
FE80@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
DicJacobus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
the market will be taken over by cheaper, less “luxury” alternatives.
Waldelfe@feddit.org 11 months ago
Soon we can translate all the GDR jokes and use them for the US.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They are fine on their island hideouts on Martha’s Vineyard and gated forts in Florida
vext01@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
Where would they get the chips and batteries?
benjhm@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
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 them across the border, so maybe this solves the fentanyl ‘issue’.Bloomcole@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Chinese phones are vastly superior to this ridiculous brand.
Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Probably not a fantasy, but it’s gonna cost like 3k bucks lmao
RaptorBenn@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Ameristan will be lucky to produce calculators if they keep up this crap.
Famko@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
MisterMoo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Grizzlyboy@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Watch out for the leopard!
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
My phone came from Samsung, who doesn’t use Chinese slave child labor. So this whole idea is pretty insane to me. You iPhone people don’t give a shit. Stop pretending.
plantmoretrees@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Tim Cook and Donald Trump = Tim Crook