this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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you fucking idiot, it's NEVER EVER EVER coming to the US.
NEVER.
a 25% increase in cost is still MUCH more preferable to bringing all of that shit to the US. probably by orders of magnitude. can you even fathom (of course you can't) what you would need to do to have a 100% American iphone?
let's say you're bringing the iphone manufacturing plant to the US. let's even assume this move is subsidized so the new factory is going to cost only time.
the iphone isn't put together from mere atoms. parts of it need to be manufactured first. there's the screen, the glass, the aluminum case, several cameras, the battery, the ram, the storage, the CPU, the GPU, the receiver, accelerometer, gyroscope, etc etc... how much of that shit do you think is made in the USA?
so there's tariffs an all of that. or to avoid them you need to make several new factories, and have other companies that provide these things also move their factories... and these factories don't just have people create electronics by hand. you need machines. where do you think those are made? who makes them? so now you need the manufacturers of manufacturing robots to move their factories to the US.
and all these factories now employ people with much higher salaries.
all in all, a move like that would halt production for years and when it comes back every iphone would probably cost $47000.
THIS IS WHY TARIFFS NEVER WORK. In the long term tariffs actually encourage manufacturing to leave the country charging tariffs, not move manufacturing there. It’s much cheaper to pay the tariffs once, on the final product, than to pay the tariffs on every part that is required moving back and forth across an “imaginary line” (border in Trump-speak).
None of Trump’s tariff bolstering hurts Apple at all. They are a global company and can easily adjust around the asinine policies of America for a few years. Americans will get sick of paying a minimum of 25% more for EVERYTHING, while the rest of the world continues on as if nothing happened. Eventually Americans will see that the rest of the world has all the nice things and they’ve become a self imposed Soviet-era block country that has nothing and has to line up for toilet paper, and they’ll be right pissed. Until then, enjoy your delusion. 👏
The other problem with moving manufacturing due to tariffs is that tariffs can always be changed, whereas moving manufacturing is a longer term investment that can cost millions, if not billions when it comes to things like chip fabs. No one wants to make an investment like that, only to have their investment suddenly become worthless because some politician decided to change how the tariffs work.
Trump's idiotic and constant flip-flopping on these tariffs have completely destroyed any chance of them actually accomplishing anything (not that they really had a great chance of that in the first place, but anyway...), because no one is going to move a factory to the US when Trump can and will change his mind based upon a whim or whoever is whispering in his ear that moment.