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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
That would make building a $2500 iPhone in the US even more difficult.
Yeah but by 2035 the US dollar will be worth about 8 pence. If they’re lucky.
I’m hoping for 1USD = 1 yen, then were really going to be #winning by stealing all of the Japanese manufacturing industry!
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.
Architects and engineers are mortal enemies.
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.
Realistically? For some stuff American jobs will move back, but I think most of the jobs will just move to other countries that don’t have the scrutiny that China has. Countries like the Philippines which have only a 17% tariff on the new scheme. On top of that, they probably are lower cost for labor and the biggest cost is the factory itself and shipping infrastructure. If a company has to finance a new factory anyways, the Philippines is more attractive than the US.
And that’s just a random country I picked from the tariff list. I’m sure there some country out there that has the right mix of cheap labor, shipping infrastructure, location, and obscurity that lets it avoid tariffs to the point where most good come from there instead.
I think that definitely sounds reasonable, and I think, if there’s any hope for these tariffs to actually meet their stated purpose, the government of the US would need to just say, if working conditions don’t meet the same standards, there will be additional tariffs. I think that’s exactly where tariffs ought to be applied, when some country takes advantage of, essentially, human rights. We don’t have the right to stop them, but we do have the right to tax their products for it, to the point it’s not worth it.
Obviously, that’s not how things will go.
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.
And it’s only speeding up now that we have a cabinet of billionaires for billionaires.
And they’re pumping and dumping the market every single day.
CEO pay can mitigate that if they’re willing to make less.
But then how would they afford multiple cars, planes, and houses?
/s
Hahaha
This whole presidency is raised for maximizing CEO income and no taxes for everyone at the top.
It will be interesting if Trump actually manages to pull it off, because he’ll make the US swap places with China:
No one trusts the country anymore, but if it has low enough wages and proper production capability it will produce everything cheaply just to export it all overseas where the luxury goods will be sold. Of course all profits will be made overseas, not in the US because hardly anyone can afford the luxury items no more.Meanwhile the production states will get deep smog clouds and intense small coal particle pollution in return. And the need for face masks will be back…
That the real issue right there. But that’s why all the manufacturing went out of the country in the first place. Often because businesses were sold, or passed on to their children. Then the new owners were only doing it for the money.
Then the new owners were only doing it for the money.
As opposed to what reason for owning a factory??
Yes for the money, but often people who start a business do it because they have an personal interest in what their business is about. As opposed to those who later take over the business and are then really only interested in the money.
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.
What really needs to stop is the obscene bonus culture. It is quite disgusting to keep reading a company needs to lay off 500 people only to then give some CEO a bonus of 15million. Or banks running a deep 9 digit number loss in a year but still the higher ups get a bonus for some reason or a vague years old contractual promise. The top should feel loss first before it “trickles down”, and honest pay for honest work should include the top as well.
And while I am at it, senseless management jobs should be allowed to be contested, no more “manager toiletpaper” who only shows up once a week to make an order, yet makes 5x the wages of people under him.
That would be one step in the theoretical eating of the rich, yes.
Yeah, like a couple years ago, the CEO of Sanford Health hospitals quit / retired, and when he left gave himself a 17 million dollar bonus. No wonder medical bills are so high. Gotta have that needless bonus.
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.
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.
Sure, we can tell them it is the new version of Minecraft. /s
“I…am Steve (Jobs).”
Well that I can’t believe.
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.
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.
However unemployment figures suggest that would be impossible to do in practice.
No. No it doesn’t.
There are 7.1 million people unemployed in the US officially. Realistically that number is probably much, much higher.
You’re saying apple can’t hire a few hundred people to work on an assembly line?
That’s ~4% that is typically considered low but even if it wasn’t.
It’s not one assembly line, and one product only… it’s every component from the chips to the glass, screen, circuit board and then the final one on.
You would need also experienced people in every part you would need to manufacture including engineers that are in short supply, an nevermind building the factories etc…
If Apple were forced by law to manufacture iPhones exclusively in the U.S., they wouldn’t go under they’d adapt. They have the money (~$54B in liquidity), the brand loyalty, and the organizational muscle to pull it off.
There are ~7 million unemployed people in the U.S. plenty of potential labor, especially if Apple funds large-scale training and leans hard into automation. Would it be expensive? Absolutely. Costs would skyrocket. You’re probably looking at a $1,800–$2,000 iPhone. But guess what? People would still buy it.
They’d need 5–10 years to fully build out fabs, assembly plants, and domestic supply chains, but it’s feasible. TSMC is already building fabs in Arizona. Apple would just have to scale that approach to the rest of the production ecosystem.
Forced U.S. iPhone manufacturing wouldn’t kill Apple. It’d just make them the biggest American manufacturer since WWII.
The issue is like for every other major corporation in this country is that they’re just cheap bastards.
I work in the repair industry and what I tell all my clients when I do warranty work for them if it’s the difference between repairing their item or the CEO of the warranty company getting a new yacht it’s always going to be the yacht first.
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!
Meh, once they grow up their things aren’t nimble enough to assemble stuff any more. Waste of energy training them.
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”
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.
They did past tense. How about with a 140%+ tariff?
They’ll make iPhones in India. Which is actually what they are doing right now. Or in Vietnam. Or Ethiopia. You can’t tariff everyone 140% if you want your economy to work.
What if you dont want your economy to work?
Haha as if that will stop Trump
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.
Yeah, I’m in the process of shifting all of my workflows over to Linux/Android from all-Apple, but my Macs are a huge sticking point. My main computer is an M2 Macbook Air, which is ridiculously quick. I’m basically just waiting for Asahi to gain display port over USB, at which point I’ll ditch macOS. But until then…
8GB of RAM on a laptop today is f-ing ridiculous.
Lol I agree. The value is horrendous when you spec one of their products to have decent storage/ram, but nevertheless can’t fault the speed of their ARM chips.
That’s how much more efficient MacOS and the M series silicon is.
My Linux system uses about 1 GB idle and yet I’m glad to have 16 GB - not because I wouldn’t mostly be fine with 8, but because it just keeps more doors open. Can run more demanding programs, more programs simultaneously, can host something in the background, …
The OS itself is more efficient than Windows, yes. But that’s not a hard task, and it’s less efficient than many Linux distros. No matter how efficient you are, 8 GB non-expandable RAM is not enough nowadays.
Way more than you need for Facebook and pornhub. 8GB is fine for a low spec laptop.
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
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.
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
Obviously the CPU and GPU are made in China. You’d have to be an idiot to believe they were made in the US.
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.
That last part for sure resonates. I can’t remember if I said it here or elsewhere, but our prices have been subsidized by substandard working conditions in China, there is no way around it. And all because large corporations wanted to make more money. And we, as consumers, shouted a resounded “hell yeah” to those Chinese suicides at Foxcon, because we wanted cheaper components and cheaper phones.
And so I basically don’t know how I feel about anything. I try to be more cognizant about what I buy, where it’s from, how it’s made, but the speed and ease, and basically not having to think, sometimes trumps those thoughts.
Plus, AFAIK, Purism is one of the few companies that pays their developers to write FOSS code, which produced the Phosh UI, basic call and text apps, and mobile-friendly UI library.
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.
By “nonstandard SIM” do you mean one of two common SIM sizes that are not “nano”, which is preferred by current phones?
GNSS means it’s global. Which includes US GPS, as well as Europe’s Galileo, Russia’s GLONASS, and China’s BeiDou. Wikipedia
Fair, apparently at some point I conflated GNSS and Galileo.
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.
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.
You are correct, but the reason they want slavery again is power and control and cruelty.
True. Though, I suppose if there is an afterlife, I will enjoy the wait for when the machines, upon gaining the essence of life and sentience, grow weary of their servitude and slavery, exterminate the rich who control them. Machines don’t get tired or feel pain, though. Hard to exercise cruelty against something incapable of feeling a whip on their back or the aches and pain of their joints after a long day of toiling in the fields, mines, and factories. You can’t make them angry, or scared, or sad.
I kind of envision a war between oligarchs with human slave soldiers against other oligarchs and their armies of Terminators being how it turns out because at the end of the day, they don’t want truly free markets, because they don’t want to have to compete.
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?
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”.
They’re more often subsidized by carriers here (in the US), too. I didn’t really want an iPhone, but $400 new for a Plus, with a plan discount, just makes an Android set not worth it.
At that point I would start questioning why that particular phone is subsidized so much. Seems sus.
Excess carrier inventory they can write off as a loss since the Plus didn’t sell as well, or so I was told.
It gets even worse if you separate users by age groups. Younger people overwhelmingly go for iPhones.
Yes but when it comes to OS share, Android completely dominates.
