As the clock ticks down to the implementation of President Trump’s higher tariffs, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has reinforced the notion that products like iPhones could potentially shift to US manufacturing. She emphasized that “if Apple didn’t believe the United States could handle it, they wouldn’t have invested such a significant amount,” referencing their recently announced $500 billion investment plan in the US.
However, analysts have pointed out that this investment aligns with expected company expenditures. Both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have previously expressed skepticism about the feasibility of such a shift.
In a conversation with New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, Leavitt responded to US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s comments regarding the tariffs possibly bringing “an army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones” to America, asserting that “absolutely, we have the labor, the workforce, and the resources to accomplish this.”
Walter Isaacson’s biography, Steve Jobs, highlights meetings between Jobs and then-President Barack Obama during 2010 and 2011. Jobs articulated a critical issue: the US lacks the 30,000 properly trained engineers necessary to support a factory workforce equivalent to the 700,000 workers employed in China:
“Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. ‘You can’t find that many in America to hire,’ he stated.”
Tim Cook has also been candid, addressing this issue in 2017 at Fortune Magazine’s Global Forum event.
“…the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago, and that is not why we come to China from a supply perspective. The reason is due to the skill and the quantity of skill concentrated in one location, along with the type of skill required. The products we manufacture demand advanced tooling and precision. In the US, you could gather all the tooling engineers in one room, and I’m unsure we could fill it — in China, you could fill multiple football fields.”
