- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Tim Cook and Donald Trump = Tim Crook
Just because you can make phones with an army of cheap Chinese labour doesn’t mean that’s the only or best way. With suitable “design for manufacture”, pick and place robots like those used in PCB design could relatively easily be adopted to screw screws in where needed. Use plugs instead of those flat cable things, then the whole lot could be easily automated. Remove any aspect of the design that needs fingers and the whole process can be automated.
If that were possible they would have already done that, since it’s cheaper to fully automate everything in the long run than to have humans involved in any part of the manufacturing process. No matter how cheap you get the labor automation will still beat it out, unless they are literal slaves, and even then the quality of work probably won’t be as good as an automated system, so it still might not be economically sensible.
Wow what a great idea, I wonder why nobody else has ever thought about it.
TBH most of the cost is from the individual components. The core chip fab, the memory fab, the oled screen fab, the battery, power regulation, cameras, all massive operations and very automated. Not to speak of the software stack. Or the chip R&D and tape out costs.
The child labor is awful, but it’s not the most expensive part of a $1k+ iPhone.
The most expensive part of an iPhone is the >50% profit margin
An old chart:
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.
It requires people who eventually jump off the roof of the building…
The problem is, while you and I have a problem with that, billionaires don’t.
The problem is the average American ain’t gonna do that kinda work.
They will when the choice is work or starve.
I 100% agree, and hope that remains to be an option. But also… things can change, and they can change fast. We are all only a few days of missed meals or missed mortgage payments from having very different standards.
Step 1 - Create a depression unlike we have ever seen and make people desperate for any job they can get.
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.
It would require Apple to accept a dollar less in profit.
deleted by creator
So you people finally admit you want and need slave work to satisfy your petty desires?
Good, good! Baby steps
Good luck getting all the materials needed for that now that China has stopped exports to the US.
IPhone 17:
Physical keys and what looks like a headphone jack? Seems like an upgrade
Replacable battery, I bet
Every 20-30 minutes…
I’ve seen M.A.S.H.. You can just crank the handle a few times to charge it!
Only $4000 for the entry model. That’s how much it costs once the tariffs on the semiconductors that you simply cannot produce in the country for at least 10 more years even if you tried has been covered, the salaries high enough to motivate people to willingly work the assembly lines now that immigrant workers are gone, and the markup needed to cover the cost of completely creating an entire supply chain from scratch as well as paying back the insane debt that results from the outrageous high risk investments this would require and that frankly no investor would want to touch with a 10 foot pole.
That is before Apple levels of profit added on, right? Otherwise that seems a bit low.
Or the Google tax of a few hundred bucks for the OS. Which could happen. Google is worse than Micro$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
?? Google pays Apple to put their search in Apple’s OS
That would be the first iPhone I’d actually buy.
$76.999 price will surely stop you.
Nah, I’ll just use my “Tariff Dividend” check when Trump writes it. China will pay for it.
If they slap an Apple logo on it the gullible sheep would buy it anyway.
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.
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…
Had a Sony Ericsson W580i back in high school. It was a slide phone. 15 hours talk, 570 hours standby. That’s nearly 24 days of standby. I charged it maybe every two weeks. It was tiny(So not great in your hands I guess). We don’t need unwieldy huge phones for good battery life. Still had a basic browser and was part of the ‘Sony Walkman’ lineup so was a decent enough music player. Modern phones are just power hungry cause they have about ~12x the power of my first desktop computer.
Crap photo but shows many angles.
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.
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.
This model was pretty cool!
My last Sony Ericsson was the S710
I’m genuinely surprised Trump killed the CHIPS act, when he could’ve let that roll through and taken credit for it as the whole POINT of that was to improve US manufacturing.
Also reintroduce the build back better with whatever re-branding.
If he were truly interested in american manufacturing he’d have gone all in on these.
But no. he wants company owners and worldl eaders to come to him and beg for exemptions.
Even if he had gone all in on manufacturing, it’s not like a supply network of industrial goods can be built in a day. Hell, it’s hard to build that in a 4-year term. Trump is virtue signalling while at the same time jeopardizing any chance America had of reshoring.
It’s honestly infuriating me how big projects needed to improve our infrastructure take years and years to complete, when from one administration to the next, those same projects can be cancelled.
It takes multiple presidencies to build something good, and it takes one to tear it all down.
I see now the benefits of China’s 5 year plans with how well organized they can control their economy.
He wants to get rid of everything associated with bEYEden and also wants to stick it to CHAIna.
I’m not surprised.
The name of the game here is to destroy America, not build it up. (Russia wants a USSR-style fall of America. The Cold War never ended for them.) And Trump wants to stay out of jail. Everything you see Trump or his admin doing can be attributed to those two things. Destroying America, or keeping himself out of Jail.
Eh, I think it’s more that Trump wants attention. The CHIPS act is bad because Biden gets credit for it, not Trump. Tariffs are good because Trump gets to force other countries to come to the US to negotiate with him. Whether the deal at the end is good or bad is irrelevant, what matters is that Trump’s name is in the news and attached to those deals.
Trump isn’t going to jail, so I highly doubt he cares much about avoiding it. He mostly cares about people talking about him, and it’s working.
I think Musk is the same way, but he does seem to care about the tech his name is attached to as well. So that’s likely to cause huge issues soon as Musk and Trump butt heads more and more.
As a European I fully support comrade Trump in his successful endeavor of destroying the imperialist and fascist US state.
Don’t talk nonsense. Trump will destroy America and take Europe down the same path if he gets the chance.
The breakdown of trust in the Atlantic alliance alone is one of the worst things that could have happened to both sides and this is just the beginning. They’re going to fuck themselves and they’re going to fuck us in the process.
I hope our EU government get some sense and stop acting like the vasals they are.
This could be the push we need.
The US never were our friends and this ‘alliance’ is nothing more than being in their sphere of influence and serving their interests. Bcs they are losing power in the world they are now canibalising their own side.
Who said ‘there will be no more Nordstream’?
And then in a pure act of terror blew it up forcing us to buy 8x more expensive US fracking gas.
Not one peep from our sell-out leaders.
We needed to drop this horrible country long time ago, regardless of Trump.
The EU is not as detached from global economics as you seem to believe it is. The fall of the US will have world wide implications, for many generations.
The EU is not as detached from global economics as you seem to believe it is
I never said that, but it needs to be done.
We need to cut ties before they drag us down further.
Our economy is already going to shit with the high energy prices caused by them blowing up Nordstream.
And that was under Genocide Joe.
I would rather have an incompetent moron in charge of the country seeing us as vasals since forever.
And if it’s up to them they will gladly see us all at war again like WW2.
Their competition destroying themselves while they benefit and sell arms.Fuck that whole country
Do you have the phrase “out of the frying pan and into the fire” in Europe?
that doesn’t apply.
It’s better to distance ourselves from them before we get caught in their dumpster fire and also get burned.And how do you plan on doing that today? You are also delusional like Trump if you think you can just cut ties and happily watch US go up in flames. That simply isn’t gonna happen, certainly not before his current term ends.
It can happen pretty fast, look what Russia did with those sactions.
The EU, their neighbour, simply got replaced.
We can certainly do the same with the US.The USSR was not thoroughly embedded in the world economies. Nor did it have as staunch of allies in major positions in EU government as the US does today. Don’t get me wrong, despite being in the US, I do think that countries divesting and becoming less dependent upon a slave state, like the US, is a good thing. However, as the “Great Recession” demonstrated, EU economies are very much entangled with the US economy, with few lessons seeming to have been learned in the last decade and a half.
Sure, the US might be more impacted, but the EU will not be unscathed, if there isn’t more effort to decouple and ditch neoliberal policies. That kind of stuff can’t happen overnight.
Trump is a personality cult. It’s not rational and whatever. It’s about him and always has been.
I’m surprised that people like you are still surprised at what Trump does.
Understanding Trump is simple: he’s a narcissist. For example, if the CHIPS act succeeds, Biden gets credit, so it’s bad. It’s really quite simple.
Right, basically renamed. Trump wants the for credit. His opposition to Obama and Biden isn’t over policy, but that his name isn’t on it.
And what is THAT supposed to be?
I’ve been screaming about the republicans since they made it clear they were going for pure obstructionism with Obama.
I’d have to look into it more, but my gut tells me the CHIPS act & ‘Build Back Better’ was filled to the brim with pork & bullshit. You’d have to parse through, line by line, and take out all the shit. And hope all the changes get passed & implemented, and of course you’re still touting the worthless name of a project that your people hate that you didn’t even create. Or just blindly trust your opponent’s judgment calls & let it roll through, based on “just trust me, bro”. Nooooo thank you. Why bother?
With stuff like this, it tends to be easier & more expedient to take it behind the shed & shoot it. Replace it with your distinctly different, branded equivalent.
However. If this is true, it appears that Trump didn’t fully raze the CHIPS act & merely revamped it, is taking credit for it. Like you said. CHIPS must have been pretty true to cause.
Oh I’m sure there was pork there, but to just dismissi t out of hand is kinda disengenouls especially when all the politicians (mostly republican) that voted against it tried snapping up credit come time for the ribbon cutting and new construction to aged infrastructure.
Granted Manchan and Senna opposed the build back better initiative and both were explicitely paid off by fossil fuel industry wonks… And i figure if they’re in opposition, ‘I want it even more out of sheer fucking spite to you greedy assholes that make money killing the planet my niece is going to have to live in.’
