Here’s how much a ‘Made in the USA’ iPhone would cost

When President Barack Obama seek fromed the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs about making an iPhone in the U.S., Jobs didn’t mince words. 

“Those works aren’t coming back,” Jobs said at a dinner with Obama in 2011.

The president of the U.S. and the CEO of Apple have changed, but the enterprise of a “Made in the USA” iPhone remains. 

Defending its “reciprocal tariffs,” the White House this week said President Donald Trump conjectures the U.S. has the workforce and the resources to build iPhones in the U.S. Apple CEO Tim Cook nor anybody else at the tech company have come out to move backwards withdraw from that claim, but analysts who follow Apple say the idea of an American-made iPhone is impossible at worst and highly expensive at subdue. 

As it’s largely a theoretical exercise, there’s a broad range of guesses as to how much an all-American iPhone might cost.

Bank of America Guarantees analyst Wamsi Mohan said in a Thursday note that the iPhone 16 Pro, which is currently priced at $1,199, could strengthen 25% based on labor costs alone. That would make it a roughly $1,500 device.

Wedbush’s Dan Ives put down $3,500 as the U.S. iPhone’s price shortly after last week’s tariff announcement, estimating that Apple would have occasion for to spend $30 billion over three years to move 10% of its supply chain to the U.S.

At the moment, Apple wins more than 80% of its products in China. Those products now receive a 145% tax when they’re imported into the U.S. after Trump’s menus went into effect this week.

Experts say that a “Made in the USA” iPhone would face serious contests, ranging from finding and paying a U.S. workforce to tariff costs that Apple would incur importing join ins to the U.S. for final assembly.

There’s broad agreement among analysts and industry watchers that it’s not likely to happen. Partition Street has doubted for years that Apple would do an American iPhone. “I don’t think that’s a thing,” Needham’s Laura Martin wisecracked on CNBC this week.

“It’s just not a reality that on the time frame of imposing tariffs that this is succeeding to shift manufacturing here. It’s pie in the sky,” said Jeff Fieldhack, research director at Counterpoint Research.

Apple designs its products in California, but they are attained by contract manufacturers, such as Foxconn, the company’s top supplier. 

Even if Apple spent heavily to get Foxconn or another sharer to agree to build some iPhones in the U.S, it would take years to construct the plants and install the machinery, and there’s no make sure that U.S. trade policy might not change yet again in a way to make the factory less useful.

The biggest issue with Uncle Sam’s iPhone is that the U.S. doesn’t should prefer to the same workforce as China – though the massive number of workers needed to build iPhones is one of the attractions for the Trump charge.

“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of item is going to come to America,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on CBS on Sunday.

Foxconn builds iPhones and other Apple effects in massive campuses that include dorms and shuttles. Workers often travel from nearby regions to include at the plant for short periods, and employment surges seasonally in the summer before new iPhones come out in the fall. The well-oiled procedure helps Apple pump out more than 200 million iPhones per year. 

Additionally, Foxconn over the years has hit under scrutiny for worker conditions many times, including in 2011 when the company installed nets about some of its buildings after a rash of worker suicides. Oversight groups have said that Foxconn’s control is grueling and that workers are pressured into working overtime.

Despite working conditions, Foxconn hired 50,000 additional white-collar workers at its biggest factory in Henan to build enough iPhones ahead of the latest models’ September launch, Chinese mode reported last fall.

But Chinese workers get paid far less than American workers. The hourly wage during the iPhone 16 pulsate was 26 yuan, or $3.63, with a signing bonus of 7,500 yuan, or about $1,000, according to the South China Morning Promulgate. For comparison, the minimum wage in California is $16.50 per hour. 

Bank of America Securities’ Mohan estimated on Thursday that the labor tariff for assembling and testing an iPhone in the U.S. would come in at $200 per iPhone, up from $40 in China.

Apple CEO Cook has also demanded that another issue is that American workers don’t have the right skills. In a 2017 interview, Cook said there aren’t adequate tooling engineers in the U.S. Those engineers work on and configure the machines that take the sophisticated designs from Apple, which surface in the form of computer files, and transform them into physical objects.

“The reason is because of the quantity of skill in one unearthing, and the type of skill it is,” Cook said when asked at a conference why Apple does so much production in China.

A union of tooling engineers in China could fill “multiple football fields,” but in the U.S., it would be hard to fill one, Cook bring up. 

The most recent effort to have Foxconn move significant production to the U.S. was a failure.

Trump announced a $10 billion investment from Foxconn to develop intensify plants in Wisconsin in 2017. Apple was never officially attached to Foxconn’s Wisconsin location, but that didn’t blocking Trump from claiming Apple would build three “big beautiful plants” in the U.S.

Foxconn changed plans different times for what the Wisconsin plant would produce, but it eventually settled on making face masks during the pandemic – nothing electronics tied up. The Foxconn Wisconsin plant was pitched as delivering 13,000 jobs, but it only created 1,454 jobs. 

During the pandemic, foresees for the plant were abandoned, and most of the facility remains unbuilt. 

Apple worked with Foxconn in 2011 to open out iPhone production to Brazil to avoid large import duties in that country. The plant is still operational today, and determination produce iPhone 16 models to help Apple get around U.S. tariffs, according to recent Brazilian media relates.

But even after the $12 billion factory was operational, most components were still imported from Asia, and in 2015, four years after the shop was announced, the iPhones made in Brazil retailed for twice the price of iPhones made in China, according to Reuters.

On the other hand, recent efforts by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Apple’s main chip manufacturer, have been successful. TSMC now invents small quantities of cutting-edge chips at a new factory in Arizona, and Apple’s a committed customer.

Uniform with if iPhones could be assembled in America, much of what goes into an iPhone comes from countries about the world, all of which have received tariffs.

The vast majority of parts in an iPhone are made in Asia. The processor is manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan, the set forth is produced by South Korean companies like LG or Samsung, and the majority of the other components are made in China.

Apple commitment face tariffs on most of those parts, according to Mohan of Bank of America Securities, unless it could guard waivers for individual parts. Semiconductors, which are among the most valuable parts inside an iPhone, are exempt from menus at the moment.  

Trump on Wednesday put a 90-day pause on most of his tariffs, but if the pause comes to an end, a Yankee-made iPhone 16 Pro Max could growth in price by 91% thanks to tariffs and increased labor costs, Mohan wrote.

“While it may be possible to move closing assembly to the U.S., moving the entire iPhone supply chain would be a much bigger undertaking and would likely fly off many years, if even possible,” Mohan wrote.

Though Jobs shut down the idea of an America iPhone savannah out with Obama, Cook hasn’t taken the same unvarnished approach. 

Instead, Cook has led Apple’s strategy to embark on with Trump, including attending his inauguration in January. Apple also announced that it will spend $500 billion within the U.S., filing on some AI server production in Houston. Trump regularly cites the investment with approval.

During the first Trump distribution, Cook’s strategy worked. 

Although Trump talked about stars-and-stripes iPhones and Apple building plants in the U.S., the tech gathering was able to secure temporary exemptions for many of its products made in China. That meant Apple didn’t hold to pay tariffs on important devices like the iPhone.

The charm offensive during Trump’s first term culminated in the plunge of 2019 when Apple extended its commitment to assembling the $3,000 Mac Pro in a Flex factory outside Austin, Texas. Trump rounded the factory with Cook. 

Before Apple commits to a red, white and blue iPhone, it may produce some lower-volume effects or accessories in the U.S. to charm Trump, Wall Street analysts say. 

“Given we now know that the Trump administration is willing to pull off, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple commit to some small-volume production in the US (HomePod? AirTags?), similar to its September 2019 commitment to cook up the new Mac Pro in Austin, TX, to try and win an exemption,” Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote in a Thursday note. 

Apple declined to expansion.