Name: Why the iPhone Can't Be Made in the US
Uploaded: 2017-07-04T04:23:58.000Z
Duration: 2 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Take a look at the back of any iPhone and you'll see a familiar phrase that's been printed

Adverbs of degree

on almost one billion units of the iconic product.

Like everything at Apple, that wording is deliberate.

Apple designs the exterior, writes the software, researches new technologies and develops its

own chips in California, which allows it to to sell devices for 65 percent more than their cost

But iPhones are assembled in China for a reason.

It's easy to assume that reason is cheaper labor.

While wages are lower, this doesn't tell the whole story.

In fact, assembly is only 2% of an iPhones hardware cost.

Today, most iPhones are made in two chinese cities: Shenzhen and Zhengzhou.

Favorable government policies helped Shenzhen become the electronics factory to the world

with Taiwanese company Foxconn its biggest employer.

As a result, thousands of companies and millions of workers have moved to the southern Chinese

During peak iPhone season, Foxconn hires almost a million people, cutting its workforce to

a few hundred thousand during low season.

Such a cluster effect in Shenzhen means that most of the components needed to make a phone,

a laptop, or a drone are within a fifty mile radius.

Attempts to recreate this cluster have so far failed.

Apple was facing high import tariffs in Brazil and urged Foxconn to make iPhones there.

After securing local incentives, Foxconn built a factory.

Rather than doing lots of high-level manufacturing in Brazil, Foxconn continued to do most of

the work back in China where the supply chain was nearby and parts could be preassembled.

This meant that most of an iPhone was made in China and merely shipped to Brazil for

local workers to slot together like lego.

In the end, the Brazil project failed on two levels - it hired a fraction of the workers

the government had expected and it didn’t attract any of Apple’s hundreds of suppliers.

If an iPhone is to be made in the U.S., it’s more likely to follow the Brazil model, not

the Shenzhen model, which means far few jobs and for those workers, making for Apple would

So while the U.S. could one day boast an iPhone "Assembled in America."