this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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you fucking idiot, it's NEVER EVER EVER coming to the US.
NEVER.
a 25% increase in cost is still MUCH more preferable to bringing all of that shit to the US. probably by orders of magnitude. can you even fathom (of course you can't) what you would need to do to have a 100% American iphone?
let's say you're bringing the iphone manufacturing plant to the US. let's even assume this move is subsidized so the new factory is going to cost only time.
the iphone isn't put together from mere atoms. parts of it need to be manufactured first. there's the screen, the glass, the aluminum case, several cameras, the battery, the ram, the storage, the CPU, the GPU, the receiver, accelerometer, gyroscope, etc etc... how much of that shit do you think is made in the USA?
so there's tariffs an all of that. or to avoid them you need to make several new factories, and have other companies that provide these things also move their factories... and these factories don't just have people create electronics by hand. you need machines. where do you think those are made? who makes them? so now you need the manufacturers of manufacturing robots to move their factories to the US.
and all these factories now employ people with much higher salaries.
all in all, a move like that would halt production for years and when it comes back every iphone would probably cost $47000.
THIS IS WHY TARIFFS NEVER WORK. In the long term tariffs actually encourage manufacturing to leave the country charging tariffs, not move manufacturing there. It’s much cheaper to pay the tariffs once, on the final product, than to pay the tariffs on every part that is required moving back and forth across an “imaginary line” (border in Trump-speak).
None of Trump’s tariff bolstering hurts Apple at all. They are a global company and can easily adjust around the asinine policies of America for a few years. Americans will get sick of paying a minimum of 25% more for EVERYTHING, while the rest of the world continues on as if nothing happened. Eventually Americans will see that the rest of the world has all the nice things and they’ve become a self imposed Soviet-era block country that has nothing and has to line up for toilet paper, and they’ll be right pissed. Until then, enjoy your delusion. 👏
tariffs could work if you're not the US. the problem is the US doesn't make anything.
for normal countries you could use tariffs to encourage products made inside the country. but for that to haopen:
so for example if your country has a decent production of bananas but people for some reason prefer to buy imported bananas way more than homemade ones, you might have some tariffs on bananas to try and reduce waste.
for that to be effective, you can't also have tariffs on soil, farming equipment and whatnot that might be going into your homemade potato production. otherwise you'd have homemade potatoes more expensive then imported ones.
Tariffs can also be an effective way of balancing buisness advantages. An example: Germany has quite high standards in its farming sector. This applys to what pesticides you are allowed to use, how much fertiliser you can use, what conditions animals have to live in and so on. Everything that you have to do to comply with these rules costs money, so in order to still make a profit you need to charge quite high prices. If you then compare these with the almost non existent standards of, as example Brazil, you quickly realise, that they are capable of producing goods much cheaper (who could have guessed, that its cheaper if you can just imassively increase your land by land grabbing, giving a shit on everything and using the most efficient, but very cruel, ways to feed and hold your livestock). Due to this, beef that gets imported into Germany from Brazil, thanks to Mercosur without any tariffs, will be magnitudes cheaper than locally made. This kills your local farming sector and also does massive damage to Brazil's citizen and enviroment (its a massive brainfuck how farming works there). If you want to counteract this you could charge tariffs, so that the consumer starts preferring locally made products, because they are cheaper. This also is an incentive for Brazil to better regulate its farming industry.