• mechoman444@lemmy.world
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    3 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
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      3 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
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        3 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.

          • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            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?

            • supercriticalcheese@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              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…

              • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                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.

      • doingthestuff@lemy.lol
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        3 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.

      • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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        3 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!

  • MuskyMelon@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Good luck getting all the materials needed for that now that China has stopped exports to the US.

    IPhone 17:

    Brick phone

    • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Don’t threaten me with a good time.

      I’d looooove a return of the brick phone. Modern phones feel small and dainty in my giant hands. Meanwhile, battery life absolutely sucks. I’d love a modern brick phone that does calls, text and nothing else. And a battery life of a fulm week.

        • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Sure, plenty of small phones with good battery life back then. Owned a new phone every three months or so, innovation went that fast in the 90’s.

          But those small phones have a few drawbacks. Too small for my hands and you can’t really shoulder it like we used to with landlines.

          I also mis proper flip phones like the Motorola Startac. You could snap those closed with authority. Can’t quite do that with those modern folding screen flips.

        • redwattlebird@lemmings.world
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          3 months ago

          Oooh! I had this back in the day. It was absolutely fantastic. I would love for this to come back again. I miss physical buttons and being able to do everything on the phone with one hand.

      • marlowe221@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I’ll take my Motorola Razr back from the early 00s.

        Whether I do Captain Kirk impressions with it in the privacy of my own home is my business…

    • besselj@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Physical keys and what looks like a headphone jack? Seems like an upgrade

    • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Only $4000 for the entry model. That’s how much it costs once the tariffs on the semiconductors that you simply cannot produce in the country for at least 10 more years even if you tried has been covered, the salaries high enough to motivate people to willingly work the assembly lines now that immigrant workers are gone, and the markup needed to cover the cost of completely creating an entire supply chain from scratch as well as paying back the insane debt that results from the outrageous high risk investments this would require and that frankly no investor would want to touch with a 10 foot pole.

      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        That is before Apple levels of profit added on, right? Otherwise that seems a bit low.

        • PacMan@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          Or the Google tax of a few hundred bucks for the OS. Which could happen. Google is worse than Micro$uck at this point and I say this as someone who returned their OEM license before. See Revolution OS https://youtu.be/k0RYQVkQmWU

          Even Linux is now weaponized for profits over anything else…:.::.

          So argument invalid

  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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    3 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.

    • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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      3 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. I see what the end goal is, supposedly, it’s just an extremely stupid, naive, or outright malicious way of accomplishing it.

  • rockhard@lemm.ee
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    3 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
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      3 months ago

      Ok but what if they cannot pay 80% less for one made in China?

      • rockhard@lemm.ee
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        3 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.

          • Robbity@lemm.ee
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            3 months ago

            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.

  • trumboner@lemmy.world
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    3 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
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      3 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.

  • MisterMoo@lemmy.world
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    3 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.

    • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
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      3 months ago

      That’s just how the media work unfortunately. They keep explaining how tariffs work to people that know it while MAGA voters post ‘Fuck Biden’ over and over on twitter.

  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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    3 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.

  • Hismama@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Maybe if wages actually rose with productivity, Americans could actually afford goods made within the United States.

        • Dragomus@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          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…

      • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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        3 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.

        • Dragomus@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          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.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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.

    • MisanthropiCynic@lemm.eeBanned from community
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      3 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.