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Last I saw it was reported around 17 hours per phone on labor. They won't get away with less than $20/hr plus benefits here. So that's around $22.50/hr. ~$380 of labor per phone just on construction. Every individual part/material will have to pay a tariff coming into the country as well unless you are going to make those here as well at the higher costs. 100% of their profit margins would be eaten up. So there are 2 options, raise the price by 50% to keep their profits, or exploit cheap labor elsewhere. They made their choice to move to India previously and India faces a 27% tariff. They keep their profits higher and prices lower by not moving manufacturing of the phone here.

You raise good points, but even if Apple was able to take some hit on the profit margin, and was able to find cheap-ish labor in the US (minimum wage likely higher than $7.25/hr though), the biggest issue in my opinion is that all the component the iPhone is made of are still imported and affected by tariffs, and making them in the US might be outright impossible for some, based on current manufacturing capabilities, or very expensive for the ones that can be made in US.

1. I'm not sure how much of their profit margin Apple would give up. It depends on how much phone sales slow down when prices go up. Is the cell phone market elastic or inelastic?

2. The labor is 2.5x more expensive than minimum wage. Do you think Apple will have minimum wage workers doing relatively skilled labor like soldering and assembling electronics? I'll likely be more in the $15-$20/hour range before even looking at benefits. I don't know how many person hours go into assembling a phone, but it's not just a few. That alone would probably add a few hundred to every phone.

3. Like you said, the most expensive portion is not the labor, it's the parts that are mostly sourced from China and Taiwan.... which have huge tariffs in the scenario Trump is talking about.

these comments also come off as a defense of sweatshop work...what it sounds like when you mock the idea of work being done by (more) reasonably paid people

You mean children. There are already children working in meat packing plants, also in automotive assembly, and elsewhere. We only hear about the companies that got caught and paid the little fine to go back to doing it.

America's future to do the jobs that left long ago will be to have children, prisoners, any of the downtrodden handling the manufacture. Similar to how crop harvesting will be handled in the more-near future as all the immigrants are sent away to a hole. Labor shortage? Well, a new random crime just surfaced to resupply the work camps. Perhaps people with "gang" tattoos.

If it were to happen, it's not going to be some magic utopia with Joe High School grad walking into the assembly plant post-WWII and buying 2 houses, a boat, and providing for a family of four. It will be just as bad as China, or worse, and "at home." America's Golden Shower Age isn't coming back.

No matter who makes it, it's still going to suck for them, until these processes are fully automated and no human is making them.

Is any of it right? No. Can we solve it? Sure, stop buying iPhones, stop being a consumer, buy the bare minimum, stop buying into retail culture. Vote people into office that care about fair labor practices across the country. There are shitty jobs that pay handsomely, oil rig work, industrial fishing, people make a lot of money doing very life-threatening work. It is completely possible these jobs could exist and pay well, but the consumer masses will balk at the cost.

More so, in the lens of right now, not gonna happen. America will be lucky to be a Democracy in a year's time.

Yeah this whole defending cheap foreign labor thing feels kind of weird to me. I might just be showing my ignorance here, but isn't the end-game for globalization about raising living standards around the world? By trading with developing countries, the investment develops their middle class and eventually their wages should catch up with ours.

It feels weird to see people saying that so much of the American economy is suddenly unviable when we have to pay livable wages. If that's the case, that's a bad thing, and it should change. Not that I think these tariffs are the solution.