A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy

This weekend, U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick went on CBS’s Face the Nation and pitched a fantasy world where iPhones are manufactured in the United States:  “The army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America, it’s going to be automated, and the tradecraft of America is going to fix them, is going to work on them, there’s going to be mechanics, HVAC specialists, electricians,” Lutnick said. “The tradecraft of America, the high school educated Americans, the core to our workforce is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high tech factories which are all coming to America.” 

The idea of a Made-in-the-USA iPhone has been an obsession for politicians for years, a kind of shorthand goalpost that would signal “American manufacturing is back” that is nonetheless nowhere close to being a reality and would require a nearly impossible-to-fathom restructuring of the global supply chains that make the iPhone possible in the first place. Over the years, economists and manufacturing experts have attempted to calculate how much an American-made iPhone would cost. In recent days a Quora answer from 2018 that suggests an American iPhone would cost $30,000 has gone repeatedly viral. A Reuters story that claims a tariffed iPhone would cost $2,300 has also gone viral.

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. 

The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries. Apple has what is among the most complex supply chains that has ever been designed in human history, and it is not going to be able to completely change that supply chain anytime soon.

We can see how the iPhone is made today by looking at numerous reports that Apple puts out every year, which outlines its current supply chain and workforce requirements. So let’s start there. The home page of Apple’s supply chain website states “Designed by Apple in California. Made by people everywhere.”