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.

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.

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.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/11/heres-how-much-a-made-in-the-usa-iphone-would-cost.html
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