Trump tells Apple to build iPhones in US

President-elect says tax breaks will encourage Apple to manufacture its phone on US shores, reports Susie Ochs

On the back of every iPhone, tiny print reminds you it was “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” One of president-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises was getting Apple to move production here – and he says he told Tim Cook that very thing directly.

In his meeting with the New York Times, Trump said he’d spoken to Cook on the phone.

I got a call from Tim Cook at Apple and I said, ‘Tim, you know one of the things that will be a real achievement for me is when I get Apple to build a big plant in the United States or many big plants in the United States, where instead of going to China and going to Vietnam and going to the places that you go to, you’re making your product right here.’

Cook replied, according to Trump: “I understand that.” So Trump dangled the carrot of tax breaks.

[Cook] said, ‘I understand that.’ I said: ‘I think we’ll create the incentives for you, and I think you’re going to do it. We’re going for a very large tax cut for corporations, which you’ll be happy about.’

It’s worth noting that the current Mac Pro, redesigned in 2013, is assembled in the USA, in a factory outside Austin, Texas. But the Mac Pro might just be Apple’s least-selling product. The iPhone is another story. Cook has claimed in the past that the reason iPhones are assembled in China is mostly one of scale – Apple can’t find enough skilled workers here to fill the needs of a company that sells as many as 400 iPhones per minute.

Cook told Charlie Rose in December 2015, “The US, over time, began to stop having as many vocational kind of skills. I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.”

We’ll have to wait and see if tax breaks are enough to bring manufacturing of any Apple product back to the US or if more structural changes in education will be needed. Apple is already reportedly looking into what such a move would cost, with a report in Nikkei Asian Review that the firm had asked Foxconn to prepare a report on the feasibility of building iPhone assembly plants in the US.

Another factor could be Trump’s plan to introduce a 45 percent tax on products imported from China. Any of these changes, should they come to pass, could affect the price of iPhones.