Don't be so negative. By 2035, a 2500 dollar us made iPhone might be possible.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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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.
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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
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.
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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.
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.
Wow what a great idea, I wonder why nobody else has ever thought about it.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.