Not many people seem to know this, but Steve Jobs initially looked at U.S. based iPhone production when he was first looking at mass producing the product in the mid 2000's, as it was preparing to go from prototype stage to production model. One of the main reasons that it wound up in China, much more so than lower labor costs, was the amount of highly skilled manufacturing engineers that FoxConn brought in to design a manufacturing process that could achieve Six Sigma+ yields, as well as being able to devote a 230,000 person workforce
in a single location to iPhone production. The American engineering firms that were approached showed up with small handfuls of engineers. The Chinese showed up with teams of engineers for each area of the process - so in total, they had an army, where we had a platoon. In a 2011 study, it was found that
if a large enough skilled workforce could be assembled in the U.S., the added incremental cost to the iPhone would be roughly $65 per unit - so not exactly the $1000 phone that many have falsely claimed that it would be, if assembled here. But the components are generally made in Asia, so there's that added shipping cost and lost time (FoxConn utilizes Just In Time supply chain management in its manufacturing operations). The manufacturing expertise and the huge workforce were there. So really, we mainly lost out because we didn't have the manufacturing capability. While FoxConn might build a facility here and assemble enough iPhones to generate some newspaper headlines, I'm not aware that anything has really changed with respect to advanced manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. And that's
really too bad. But at least that's something that's fixable... if we now have an administration that will work to fix it, rather than just allowing Silicon Valley tech giants to just "import" cheap foreign talent on H1B visas. I am cautiously optimistic.
As far as I know, Apple still makes the Mac Pro in the U.S. (in Austin, TX, I believe). But that's a low volume, high priced, niche machine. After its glitzy relaunch back in 2013, where Tim Cook announced a $100 million "Built in the U.S." initiative, the Mac Pro hasn't been updated since.
