"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."
    • CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Probably just lean super heavily on Taiwan, and Taiwan is also pledging to build a chip factory in the US. Georgia area, IIRC.

      Batteries fucking suck. Can’t live with 'em, can’t live without 'em…but they’re always saying we’re on the cusp of an exciting new battery technology. Lately, they’re touting the idea of better, more efficient sodium batteries with all organic components.

      While obviously it has a ways to go to reach working parity with lithium, there are also some big pros when it comes to safety & the ridiculous availability of sodium. If we can switch to sodium batteries, China takes a fucking massive hit.

  • MuskyMelon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

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

    IPhone 17:

    Brick phone

    • DaddleDew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month 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.

        • PacMan@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          1 month 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

    • besselj@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

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

    • FinishingDutch@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month 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.

      • JordanZ@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        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.

        • FinishingDutch@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          1 month 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.worldEnglish
          0·
          1 month 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.

  • cerement@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    not to mention one of the reasons we eagerly off-shored electronics fabrication in the first place is because it’s a toxic nightmare

  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    1 month 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.

  • Singletona082@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    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.

    • CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      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.

    • IonAddis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      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.

      • Bloomcole@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        As a European I fully support comrade Trump in his successful endeavor of destroying the imperialist and fascist US state.

        • Tryenjer@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          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.

          • Bloomcole@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            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.

          • Bloomcole@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            that doesn’t apply.
            It’s better to distance ourselves from them before we get caught in their dumpster fire and also get burned.

            • RogueBanana@lemmy.zipEnglish
              0·
              1 month ago

              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.

              • Bloomcole@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                1 month ago

                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.

                • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
                  0·
                  30 days ago

                  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.

        • smeenz@lemmy.nzEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          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.

          • Bloomcole@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            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

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        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.

    • moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Trump is a personality cult. It’s not rational and whatever. It’s about him and always has been.

  • MisterMoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month 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.netEnglish
      0·
      1 month 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.

  • jcs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    28 days ago

    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.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      29 days ago

      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.

      • falcunculus@jlai.luEnglish
        0·
        29 days ago

        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.

        • Dozzi92@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          29 days ago

          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.

        • Yaky@slrpnk.netEnglish
          0·
          29 days ago

          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.

      • turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        29 days ago

        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.

        • Yaky@slrpnk.netEnglish
          0·
          29 days ago

          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

  • Famko@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Instead of Vietnamese children making t-shirts to sell to the USA, they want American children to make t-shirts to sell to Vietnam.

    This makes absolutely no fucking sense even from a nationalistic standpoint.

    • Rob1992@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Nah man, they’ll start using the prisons for more then menial labor. You don’t have to pay them at all

      • Phil_in_here@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        But then they have to fill those prisons with more and more people. How can America just increase the crime rate on a whim?

        glances briefly to American history

        Oh right, shit.

        • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          30 days ago

          Slavery never ended in the US, it just got better PR.

          “Only prisoners can be sentenced to slave labor.”

          Makes a while bunch of stuff punishable by prison time and makes prison sentences longer.

  • trumboner@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month 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.

          • trueheresy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            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.

            • MIDItheKID@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              30 days ago

              Step 1 - Create a depression unlike we have ever seen and make people desperate for any job they can get.

    • Nexz@feddit.nlEnglish
      0·
      1 month 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.

    • humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      China has a lot more leverage to increase this price. Export tariffs on US listed companies to US, and perhaps to countries that choose to further increase sycophancy to US empire. Prevent US manufacturing with more export controls.

      The problem with decades of propaganda/smearing is that too many people believe it. Bessent yesterday said “They only have a pair of 2s” as cards. No one in the room has not been programmed to “repeat that China is on brink of collapse for all of the last 20 years”. Hitler couldn’t win war because generals had to be loyal to every syphilis inspired thought of the dotard.

    • Tryenjer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Bold of you to assume that Trump and Company won’t put the average American to work for almost nothing. The planned economic recession is to convince the people to do so.

      The new generation of American children will not spend most of their time studying in school, but rather working in factories for a handful of peanuts. That’s Trump’s America.

    • pyre@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      shouldn’t affect sales though because apple fanboys will sell their grandmother to buy the latest status symbol phone