Inc. Magazine
Trump’s tariffs are sparking market volatility and fears of a recession, but the goal is to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Critics, including Steve Jobs, argue that factors like cost, skilled labor, and global supply chains make this vision difficult. Realistic policies are needed for success.
14 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Explained Why iPhones Can’t Be Made in America. It’s Worth Revisiting Today
Author: Jessica Stillman
Trump’s tariffs might be stoking wild market swings and recession fears, as well as causing huge headaches for America’s small business owners. But according to Peter Navarro, the architect of Trump’s tariff policy, the pain will be worth the payoff.
The endgame of all this disruption, Navarro explained, is “to fill up all of the half-empty factories that now are operating at low capacities around Detroit and the greater Midwest area.”
Bringing back middle-class manufacturing jobs clearly has a nostalgic appeal. But there is no shortage of skeptics of this plan. The most surprising among them might be Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs on manufacturing in America
Wait, you might object. How could the long departed former Apple boss possibly have an opinion on a policy launched more than a decade after his passing? He couldn’t, of course. But Trump isn’t the first modern American president to dream of bringing manufacturing jobs to America’s heartland.
Way back in 2011 President Obama dined with Silicon Valley bosses in California. He too had manufacturing on his mind. Over dinner he asked Jobs, “What would it take to make iPhones in the United States?” the New York Times reported.
The famously blunt Apple boss wasn’t shy about shooting down the president’s musings. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he replied.
The reason why wasn’t just lower costs in countries like China. “Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products,” wrote the Times, summing up discussions.
To illustrate, the paper offered a story shared by a former Apple executive about a last-minute design change to the iPhone’s screen that forced a change in the manufacturing process at the Chinese factory where the phones were being assembled.
Around midnight, a foreman “roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing more than 10,000 iPhones a day,” the article reveals.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive told the Times. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
Do Americans even want manufacturing jobs?
The whole incident is a fascinating bit of business history (you can read a ton more details in the original piece). But what has it got to do with today?
Many things have shifted in the world since 2011. But has the U.S. regained the “flexibility, diligence and industrial skills” that Steve Jobs told Obama it lacked in 2011? A host of experts insist that the Trump administration is as misguided in dreaming of a speedy iPhone manufacturing revival as Obama was back then.
Can you imagine American workers agreeing to be awoken in the middle of the night to start clicking glass into phone frames? Probably not, and recent surveys support this intuition.
A 2024 survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that Americans broadly share Trump’s nostalgia for the heyday of manufacturing with 80 percent of respondents saying the country would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing. But how many people wanted to take on these manufacturing jobs themselves? Just 25 percent.
A deeply reported piece on TSMC’s new massive semiconductor plant in Arizona by the Verge last year found yawning gaps between the expectations of the company’s Taiwanese bosses and their new American colleagues.
“The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company; Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience they believe to be the foundation of their company’s world-leading success,” the article claims.
14 more reasons not to build in America
Even if misaligned expectations can be ironed out throughout time, there are plenty of other problems holding back the dream of a U.S.-produced iPhone. Educational toy company founder Molson Hart recently spelled them out in a detailed blog.
For one, a decade after Steve Jobs’s declaration, the U.S. still lacks the supply chain to build electronics.
“When it comes to the iPhone, all the factories which make the needed components are in Asia,” he writes. “Supply chains sound complicated, but aren’t. If you can’t get the components you need at a reasonable price and timeline to build a finished product, it doesn’t matter what the tariffs are, you have to import it, because you can’t build it locally.”
The U.S. also lacks the necessary skills, according to Hart. And not just for high-tech products like semiconductors.
“My company makes educational toys from plastic called Brain Flakes. To make Brain Flakes, you melt plastic and force it into shaped metal molds. Were we to import the machines and molds needed to do this, it would work for a little while, but as soon as one of those molds broke, we’d be in trouble, because there are almost no mold makers left in the United States. The people who knew how to build and repair molds have either passed away or are long retired.” he explains.
If his company manufactured here and a mold broke, they’d have to send it to China for repairs, “shutting down production for months.”
The first step toward a U.S. manufacturing revival: realism
These are just two points in Hart’s 14-point list of detailed reasons Steve Jobs was right and manufacturing jobs “are not coming back” easily or quickly as the result of tariffs.
This doesn’t mean manufacturing in some form and in some industries can never come back at all. There are plenty of policies that could slowly build capacity and make it easier to make things again in America. Hart has a long list of those too, such as fixing the health care system that makes hiring in America so expensive and improving students’ math performance and physical health. Targeted tariffs on certain products might even make sense.
But that’s a conversation for a much larger article. I’m not here to offer a detailed plan for reviving American manufacturing. Instead, consider this a simple reminder that the cautionary words Steve Jobs offered to Obama well over a decade ago still stand. We ignore them at our peril.
If your goal is to increase America’s manufacturing capacity, it helps to have a realistic understanding of the obstacles you’re facing. Without it, how can you roll up your sleeves and start working to overcome them?
Credits: TCA, LLC.