The White House is insisting that Donald Trump’s vision of Apple’s flagship iPhones being manufactured in the US will come to fruition, despite assertions from analysts and the company itself that it would not be possible.
The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters during Tuesday’s briefing that the president believed Apple’s recently announced $500bn investment, as well as increasing import costs sparked by his trade tariffs, would encourage the company to ramp up manufacturing in the US.
“He believes we have the labor, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it. If Apple didn’t think the US could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change,” she said.
Trump doubled down on the claim on Wednesday, posting to his Truth Social network that: “This is a great time to move your company into the US, like Apple, and so many others, in record numbers, are doing.
“Zero tariffs, and almost immediate electrical/energy hook ups and approvals. No environmental delays.”
The problem, according to experts, including Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, and his predecessor, the late Steve Jobs, is that the US does not have the workforce of other nations where the vast majority of its electronics are currently manufactured, such as China, which makes about 85% of iPhones, India and Vietnam.
They say it puts out of reach a vision presented by Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, to CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, of Apple, and other tech companies, tapping into “the tradecraft of America” to get its products made.
“Remember 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,” Lutnick said.
“It’s going to be automated and great Americans – the tradecraft of America – is going to fix them, is going to work on them.”
Jobs, however, was adamant as far back as 2010 that such a scenario could not come to pass. Axios reported on Tuesday comments Jobs made, in Walter Isaacson’s biography, during conversations with Barack Obama, that the US lacked the quantity of highly trained personnel the company would need.
Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, Jobs said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers.
“You can’t find that many in America to hire,” he said.
More recently, Cook, whom Trump memorably referred to as “Tim Apple” during his first term, was just as forthright, Axios reported. Cook told Fortune in 2017 that companies like his relied on countries such as China not for cheap labor, but the quality of trained employees.
“The reason is because of the skill and the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill,” he said.
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“[Our] products require really advanced tooling. The precision that you have to have in tooling, and working with the materials that we do, are state-of-the-art, and the tooling skill is very deep here.
“In the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China you could fill multiple football fields.”
Other experts, meanwhile, reject the White House’s insistence that tariffs will encourage Apple to begin building its products in the US with American workers aided by robots.
“I don’t think that’s a thing,” Laura Martin, a senior technology analyst at Needham, told CNBC’s The Exchange.
“You couldn’t do it immediately, it takes years. India’s taken like three years to get up to 14% of [Apple’s] iPhone volumes.”
Anxiety over tariffs has contributed to Apple’s market woes, with stock having slumped about 31% this year. On Wednesday, it was reported that Microsoft had overtaken Apple as the world’s most valuable company.
