• Defending its “reciprocal tariffs,” the White House this week said that President Donald Trump believes the U.S. has the workforce and the resources to build iPhones in the U.S.

• Analysts who follow the company say the idea of an American-made iPhone is impossible at worst and highly expensive at best.

• One analyst estimates that on labor wages alone, a U.S.-made iPhone could cost 25% more than they do now. Another analyst pegged the price of a stars-and-stripes iPhone at $3,500.

In this article

 tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., speaks during a “First Tool-In” ceremony at the TSMC facility under construction in Phoenix, Arizona, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2022.

Caitlin O’Hara | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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

“Those jobs 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 ambition of a “Made in the USA” iPhone remains.

Defending its “reciprocal tariffs,” the White House this week said President Donald Trump believes 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 back that claim, but analysts who follow Apple say the idea of an American-made iPhone is impossible at worst and highly expensive at best.

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

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

At the moment, Apple makes 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 tariffs went into effect this week.

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

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

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

A man checks an iPhone 16 Pro as the new iPhone 16 series smartphones go on sale at an Apple store in Beijing, China September 20, 2024.

Florence Lo | Reuters

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

Even if Apple spent heavily to get Foxconn or another partner 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 guarantee 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 have the same workforce as China – though the massive number of workers needed to build iPhones is one of the attractions for the Trump administration.

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

Foxconn builds iPhones and other Apple products in massive campuses that include dorms and shuttles.

Workers often travel from nearby regions to work at the plant for short periods, and employment surges seasonally in the summer before new iPhones come out in the fall. The well-oiled system helps Apple pump out more than 200 million iPhones per year.

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

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

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

Bank of America Securities’ Mohan estimated on Thursday that the labor cost 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 said that another issue is that American workers don’t have the right skills. In a 2017 interview, Cook said there aren’t enough tooling engineers in the U.S. Those engineers work on and configure the machines that take the sophisticated designs from Apple, which come in the form of computer files, and transform them into physical objects.

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

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

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 build plants in Wisconsin in 2017. Apple was never officially attached to Foxconn’s Wisconsin location, but that didn’t stop Trump from claiming Apple would build three “big beautiful plants” in the U.S.

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

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

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

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

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

Apple CEO Tim Cook escorts President Donald Trump as he tours Apple’s Mac Pro manufacturing plant with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin looking on in Austin, Texas, November 20, 2019.

Tom Brenner | Reuters

Even if iPhones could be assembled in America, much of what goes into an iPhone comes from countries around 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 display is produced by South Korean companies like LG or Samsung, and the majority of the other components are made in China.

Apple would face tariffs on most of those parts, according to Mohan of Bank of America Securities, unless it could secure waivers for individual parts. Semiconductors, which are among the most valuable parts inside an iPhone, are exempt from tariffs 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 increase in price by 91% thanks to tariffs and increased labor costs, Mohan wrote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Given we now know that the Trump administration is willing to negotiate, 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 manufacture the new Mac Pro in Austin, TX, to try and win an exemption,” Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote in a Thursday note.