Although the Trump administration has sought to bring iPhone manufacturing back to the United States, this goal faces profound economic and technical complexities. Motorola’s past experience, which closed its Texas factory after just one year due to high costs and weak sales, illustrates the difficulty of producing smartphones in America, highlighting the fundamental challenges any similar attempt would face.
China is no longer simply a destination for reducing labor costs: it has become a global center with speed, flexibility, advanced industrial infrastructure, and complex supply networks built over decades. Apple’s supply chain, spanning 187 suppliers in 28 countries, relies on an interconnected network: high-precision components are produced in Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan, then assembled in China, which offers the expertise and industrial capacity needed for large-scale production. Today, China offers an integrated manufacturing environment, with proximity between suppliers and the ability to quickly adapt to design and production changes.
Less than 5% of the components in an iPhone are currently made in the United States, such as the cover glass or some core chips, while the majority are produced in China and other Asian countries. Shifting production to the United States would require years of massive investment in automation, infrastructure, and the training of thousands of skilled engineers—requirements that are difficult to meet in the short term. Moreover, factories like Foxconn’s, which produce more than 50% of the world’s iPhones, rely on local networks comprising thousands of small suppliers, which would be nearly impossible to relocate to the United States.
The complexity of production, such as machining aluminum shells using specialized CNC machines or sourcing high-precision screws, as well as the reliance on rare earths like lanthanum and dysprosium mined in China, makes a manufacturing shift virtually unfeasible in the short term. Furthermore, TSMC, Apple’s main processor supplier, relies primarily on facilities in Taiwan and South Korea. Although a factory is under construction in Arizona, large-scale production is not yet operational.
Apple has already begun diversifying its supply chains, shifting some production to India, where it offers government incentives, lower costs, and a large domestic market. It is estimated that around 20% of global iPhone production will be assembled in India this year, with the goal of soon producing all iPhones for the US market there. However, many components will continue to be imported from China and other Asian countries, highlighting the difficulty of establishing a fully self-sufficient production chain.
Amid trade tensions, Apple is pursuing its risk-mitigation strategy by also expanding into Vietnam and Brazil. But rebuilding a manufacturing ecosystem entirely outside of China, whether in the United States or elsewhere, would require significant time, massive investment, and radical changes to global supply chains.
Thus, while politically desirable, shifting iPhone manufacturing to the United States remains impractical in the short term, due to supply chain complexity, high costs, and deep dependence on industrial capacity and developed infrastructure in China and Asia.