Anyone who’s remotely familiar with how electronics are built knows a US-made phone is not feasible, at least not in the time span of the current administration, but 404 media’s Jason Koebler wrote a pretty thorough article explaining why.

A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy 404media.co

This is behind a paywall, so I’ll sum up the three main reasons:

  1. No workforce (not enough American workers are trained for this job, and they’d cost too much anyway)
  2. No materials (Apple’s supply chain lists roughly lists 80 different countries)
  3. No Factories (the machines for these factories are also manufactured overseas)

Some of the quotes I liked in this article:

The Reshoring Institute put out a paper that said American machine operators made an average of $43,000 annually in 2022; Vietnamese machine operators made less than $5,000 annually.

‘Factories require machinery and components from other countries, so if machinery gets really expensive you’re going to have less manufacturing, not more. So I think this is very unlikely to yield the results that they want.’

It is also worth considering that Foxconn, which manufactures iPhones and other devices, got billions of dollars of funding to build a factory in Wisconsin, failed to do so, and totally abandoned the site. Foxconn failed in Wisconsin for many reasons (chief among them, it did not ever actually build a factory, which was covered best by The Verge), but an executive there explained that it was not feasible for the company to find workers only from the local communities: “It is not feasible to tap into just Mount Pleasant or Milwaukee alone to really build up the talent pool,” Alan Yeung, who helped lead the Foxconn project, told The Verge.

The quote below is from a different article by Jason, interviewing the CEO of a company that’s trying to make a 100% US-built phone, but it highlights the material problem:

One specific item is a type of crystal that needs to be put into phones, which is basically for keeping track of time and a few other measurement metrics. That crystal is something that only comes from China, and maybe I think you can get it from South Korea, which is where we either are sourcing or trying to source that last component from.

By the way, the phone, Liberty Phone by Purism, is a $2000 Android device with mid-specs that cannot compete with phones less than half its price. And It’s still not entirely made in the US.