Presidential hopeful Donald Trump is currently the republican frontrunner, and we’ve never seen anything quite like this happen before in the United States. Sure, we’ve had our fair share of unconventional candidates, but none have managed to garner quite so much support at this late stage in the game. And it’s not that Mr. Trump is unintelligent or insane, he’s actually a brilliant businessman. It’s the zealousness with which he proposes his outlandish ideas despite knowing as well as you or I that they’re simply not rooted in reality.
But just for a moment, let’s pretend one of his outbursts is rooted in reality. Let’s say Trump is elected president this coming November and among his first orders of business upon taking office, he forces Apple to build its “damn computers and things in this country,” as he so eloquently put it. What might that do to the cost of Apple’s next iPhone, we wonder?
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Apple’s iPhone 8 is set to launch in the late summer or early fall in 2018. Since the iPhone 7 will have been released before Trump takes office and iPhone 7s development will already be underway, let’s pretend Trump can drop a fist and have the gigantic facilities needed to create Apple’s products up and running in time for the iPhone 8.
And hey, the production of these factories will have created tens of thousands of jobs in America, so we’re already ahead of the game.
CNET spoke to a few people who did some very loose math, and it determined that the end-user cost of an iPhone built in the U.S. as opposed to abroad in China would be about $1,300, or twice what it is today.
That estimate is wildly conservative. It’s based on factory laborers working at minimum wage for eight hours a day, five days a week. Sadly, it doesn’t take into account the added cost of running a facility like this in the U.S. Or the added labor Apple would need if workers were to only have eight-hour shifts. Or of shipping materials and components to the U.S. instead of China and Brazil. Or a dozen other things.
Long story short, pretty much no one would be able to afford Trump’s magnificent U.S.-made iPhone. But since when is anything Trump says rooted in reality?
