A ‘U.S.-Made iPhone’ is Pure Fantasy ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

These articles are good exercises but they are also total fantasy. There is no universe in which Apple snaps its fingers and begins making the iPhone in the United States overnight. It could theoretically begin assembling them here, but even that is a years-long process made infinitely harder by the fact that, in Trump’s ideal world, every company would be reshoring American manufacturing at the same time, leading to supply chain issues, factory building issues, and exacerbating the already lacking American talent pool for high-tech manufacturing. In the long term, we could and probably will see more tech manufacturing get reshored to the United States for strategic and national security reasons, but in the interim with massive tariffs, there will likely be unfathomable pain that is likely to last years, not weeks or months.

Apple itself is already attempting to make its manufacturing less dependent on factories in China, specifically, but it is a slow transformation over years, and not necessarily in a single direction. Notably, it is not moving production to the United States, instead working with Foxconn to build factories in India, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Not only do these countries have lower labour costs and proximity to parts sourcing countries, they also have higher population densities permitting a greater workforce near a factory. Foxconn’s ridiculous con of a U.S. factory for “AI 8K+5G” was built on farmland outside a village outside Wisconsin’s fifth biggest city. Total population of the entire county: 197,727. That is less than the workforce of just one of Foxconn’s factories making iPhones.

Anyone who has spent time digging into the supply chains of just about any industry is probably similar parts amazed and disgusted by what they find, and rightfully so. It strains my ability to understand anything to know a device as precise as a smartphone can be made at scale, about as much as I am also baffled when I see Walmart selling a pair of jeans for less than $20. The only way this is possible is at a huge human cost. This happens far away and — in a way beneficial to the name brands involved — at third-party factories, subcontractors, or a component business deep in the supply chain. But this human exploitation is not relegated to over there; it happens closer to home too.

I think it is fair and correct to support greater diversification of manufacturing, including to rich countries. What bothers me is how much of the discussion I have seen concerns the dollar value of a hypothetical made-in-the-U.S. iPhone, and how little focuses on higher labour standards no matter where a product is made. Workers’ rights are not what U.S. tariffs are ultimately about. But the exploitation is ours. We, the richest countries in the world, go into developing nations and extract from their people and environment the products we want for the incredibly generous lifestyle we have. Some factory owners have become very rich in being able to meet our demands; many people have not. And then we just move on. Now the U.S. is punishing everyone around the world for partaking, necessarily, in an entrenched global system of trade. Maybe iPhones get more expensive later this year, and maybe that means we buy fewer. The human and environmental cost will be similar. But we will still buy them.