How a $2k 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured
480 comments
·April 10, 2025ralferoo
xorcist
Define "produce", I guess? The price differential suggests that it refers to final assembly, which is common when components have different tax codes than the final product.
Creating domestic jobs this way doesn't have a great track record however. They are usually quite expensive. And they don't help the geopolitical uncertainty at all, which is at least hinted at being something of an end goal.
Sure, you can ship parts all over the phone and have assembly in the final country. But what does that solve? What people usually think of when discussing where products are "produced", the components or at least a majority thereof, is the same.
Where do you source OLED screens in necessary quantity to produce a popular mobile phone model in the US, or any other Western country? Or the batteries? It's not a question of cost. It a question of non-existence.
Changing global production is a not a singular problem but something that would require laser focus during several decades and many different areas just to be something that could be taken seriously.
threeseed
> Creating domestic jobs this way doesn't have a great track record however
Especially when you gut the DoE and make zero effort to invest in either higher education or trades training.
If US wants a manufacturing revolution it needs to start with an education revolution.
htek
I don't see how the US can compete with China on sheer production and access to manufacturers and suppliers of tech, compared to cities like Shanghai, Qingdao and Shenzhen, among others. It's like a candy store for engineers. Building a single plant just isn't economically feasible when you have so much uncertainty from the chaos at the WH. Not to mention, this will take a decade or much, much more.
A better way (IMO) to do it would have been tax incentives to build US plants to move manufacturing back in the US, have research university programs as feeders for tech innovation centers, and funding for technical colleges to expand their programs for skilled labor needed instead of gutting multiple agencies that would have overseen/guided this expansion. And oversight, of course. And attainable goals set in contracts to receive funding, not just, "here's a pile of money we'll forget about in 4 years."
Analemma_
This is a chicken-and-egg problem. It's economically irrational for any given individual to pursue vocational training in a field where there isn't a job waiting for them at the end. You can make the training in these fields available, but without the jobs, who will bother using it?
philwelch
One of the root causes of the situation we find ourselves in is that the federal government has been subsidizing higher education beyond diminishing returns for decades. Simply removing the mechanisms to do that would be a net improvement.
1dom
> Define "produce", I guess?
If you're sincerely interested in the answer to that question, I'd highly recommend reading the article, because a good portion is dedicated specifically to answering that.
hilux
I read the article - up to a point. The guy goes to such great lengths not to admit that a huge proportion of the physical parts in the phone are from China. E.g, he keeps saying "Western distributor" to avoid saying "China-made." (Think about it: why would any reader care about the distributor's nationality?!) He just rambles on and on, trying to baffle us with bullshit - eventually I stopped reading.
There is zero chance that a smartphone will ever be made out of 100% US-manufactured parts, or even close to it. And the evidence is right in this article, if this is the best effort to manufacture a "US phone."
ocdtrekkie
> Define "produce", I guess?
The article does, in fact. Their US made phone is manufactured, not just assembled, in the United States, and also attempts to source nearly all parts and materials from US suppliers as well.
xorcist
Yes, and article starts out by definining manufacture as "assembly using more advanced tools than a screwdriver". They solder. Good for them. They keep mentioning that their resistors are made in the US. That's great, but not unique to them.
They don't manufacture their important components. Not even Apple does that. No one does. There is roughly zero chance that any of the non-interchangable bits, the SoC, the battery or the screen, is manufactured in the US.
And there is nothing wrong with that. It's just silly to pretend otherwise.
varispeed
and how do you check if electrons in the circuit are US and not Chinese?
rs186
Cost is just one part of the equation. What about the ability to quickly switch the supplier of a part, to make a small design change, to ramp up the production of the next model, etc? Lots of articles suggest that you can start manufacturing and adapt much faster in China than in the US.
Also, there is nothing in the article that talks about the quality of the phone. Being manufactured in the US does not automatically make it a high quality product. I'd take an iPhone manufactured anywhere in the world than this Liberty phone.
like_any_other
> the real issue is that they don't have any more production capacity in the US
Economists selling people on free trade like to omit this, but production capacity, efficiency, cost, and technical know-how, aren't static, but improve based on demand.
Diesel555
You do not understand microeconomics. No economist would ever advocate for free trade in an academic environment. Competitive markets are the goal. The older I get the more I think microeconomics should be a basic course for voters. All the things you list “production capacity, efficiency, cost, and technical know-how” are well studied.
doganugurlu
And you seem to be omitting that they won’t change given the demand won’t change.
In other words, people won’t just buy multiple iPhones just because it’s made locally.
like_any_other
I omitted it because I thought it was so glaringly obvious that it didn't need explaining: a factory owner doesn't care what the global or local demand for a product is, but at the demand for his factory's output. Which can increase, despite the consumer demand staying the same, if the competitiveness of other factories diminishes, like from tariffs.
BiteCode_dev
It's $650 in a world in which you don't have tariffs with China.
In a world in which you do, you pay more for the machines, the materials, the components you can't make in the US (a phone is thousands of component, phone makers don't make most of them), etc.
It's probably $650 to design it, build half the parts, ordering most other parts and assemble them.
Now what's interesting with the tariffs is that it's not just it will make the parts you can order more expensive, it will make the supply of such parts available to you restricted since you are now competing with buyers that don't have tariffs and can outbid you easily.
Or course, all this include rare earth supply which China already restricted for US export, so even the part you can make are going to be super expensive. The premium is going to be way more than the tariff ones.
Finally, since you are not going to be able to sell to the Chinese market of 1.5M of people, you will sell fewer phones, meaning your volume effect will be lower.
Meanwhile, competitors from Asia and Europe will be able to sell to the rest of the world, unrestricted by such problems, so much more price competitive and with a more robust cash flow. So you will lose markets in other areas too, hitting your volume effect even more, possibly sending you spiraling.
So, it's definitely pop corn time.
MarcellusDrum
Is this the price in just components? I skimmed through the article and that wasn't clear. Because if it doesn't include labor costs, then its reasonable that the US phone sells for a lot more.
hkmaxpro
Your question prompted me to look up “cost of goods sold”.
From https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cogs.asp
> Cost of goods sold (COGS) refers to the direct costs of producing the goods sold by a company. This amount includes the cost of the materials and labor directly used to create the good. It excludes indirect expenses, such as distribution costs and sales force costs.
So the $550 or $650 COGS includes the cost of labor for manufacturing, but excludes (say) marketing and auditing costs.
balderdash
And would exclude all of the R&D, certification and testing, procurement, and in some cases depreciation from factories/equipment
gknapp
Right, but this is the same company, so the cost of marketing, auditing, R&D, etc. shouldn't be different for these products. That's a fixed cost for the company.
This is a guess, but the argument is probably that it took way more R&D effort for them to figure out how to produce it efficiently in the US, and they've chosen to increase the cost of the US phone variant to offset this particular R&D expenditure that the Chinese variant didn't have.
3D30497420
It is not just the labor/components, but that it is for a different market with different expectations and requirements. From the article:
> You can look at our concrete numbers. We sell a Chinese made Librem 5 phone for $799. We sell the Liberty phone for $2,000. When you're looking at just those numbers alone, that looks like a giant leap in cost. But there's a couple of factors that are not publicly known when you're looking at just those prices. When you're looking at COGS, cost of goods sold, our Librem 5 phone is equivalent in cost to about an iPhone. It's about $500 and some odd dollars, $550. So we can see that the Librem 5 phone doesn't have a very high margin when we sell it. The Liberty phone, same COGS componentry wise, but to produce it on US soil, we're adding not quite a hundred dollars. So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone. But what we're doing by selling it for greater originally, we're looking at a lot of differentiators for us. It wasn't just made in the USA. It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.
matt-p
I did find that so surprising that it almost doesn't feel right. Hard to see why they'd bother making two different SKUs in two different places if the cost delta is only $100 they'd surely be better off shifting all the volume to the american phone and working to get it down to down to $550.
bluGill
How much volume are we talking about. I don't know the important numbers but my guess is the automotion needed to get the in us cost down is more than they sell. That is a million dollar machine that repleces 60 workes is a bad investment when they only have one worker.
keepamovin
*Excluding tariffs.
It's good they are being transparent. This is the future. Does "produce" include staff salaries involved in manufacture? Does it include salaries for staff in R&D?
ralferoo
My understanding of "cost of goods sold", which is quite likely to be wrong, is yes for the first and no for the second. Or at least, it'd include the pro-rated salaries of the staff for the time spent producing the goods.
I think it's essentially if you had all the designs for a product and asked someone else to manufacture it for you, everything they would spend and charge you for producing the product and delivering it to your ship (or whatever), at which point you take over all the rest of the costs including the shipping.
b8
It's cheaper just to buy the hardware from China and install their OS on it. They overcharge for a lot of their products including their mini pc which you can just boy from aliexpress and install coreboot on it for way cheaper, https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/New-Top-mini-pc-i7-10....
seba_dos1
Depends on the product. Purism doesn't only sell existing (such as servers) or modified (such as minis) hw designs, but also completely original ones (such as phones).
b8
True, but they're also outdated hardware rise. They also sell a service for "aweSIM" which is suppose to be a privacy sim card, but they literally just sign up for you and then overcharge you. Better to use a MNVO like US Mobile and giving them fake PI.
paulorlando
The important quote: "If the tariff from China is 100%, and you know it is going to be 100 % for the next 10 years, you will make a different business decision than if it is, ‘Might be 100%, not sure what's going to be in three months, what's it going to be in a year from now, and what's it going to be in three years from now.’ That uncertainty does not create stable markets. It does not create very accurate business decisions."
notahacker
Yeah. If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate very clearly what you were going to do and then ratchet up the tariffs on those specific finishes products, whilst being sure to maintain access to raw materials and components you still needed. What you wouldn't do is slap unexpectedly high tariffs on absolutely everything, shout about how you'll do a deal if only they respect you, and then walk them back in as inept and inconsistent a manner as possible. That's what you'd do if you wanted to destroy what's left of your industry. Think there's anyone in the rest of the world relying on US suppliers that hasn't started looking elsewhere? And it might now be cheaper for Americans to import from Japan or South Korea than from US companies dependent on Chinese components in their supply chain...
tdb7893
Subsidizing specific manufacturing and having at least some consistency was a big part of the US strategy until the last few months. Most notably, the US passed huge subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in 2022.
I don't know how effective that will be but it at least seems more coherent than these goofy tariffs (whatever people think of tariffs overall we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week).
mullingitover
> we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week
We absolutely cannot create the expectation that we plan to get what we say we want: zero trade deficits.
If we even succeed in making the rest of the world believe we're going to do this it will be catastrophic. So much of the advantages the US enjoys rides on trust and goodwill, and zeroing trade deficits would wreck the world economy and destroy trust in the US dollar as a safe haven. Just like paying down the national debt would.
douglasisshiny
It was insanely effective: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON. Notice the sharp dip at the end there.
ta998
(Software dev working for a European manufacturer of industrial automation equipment)
We just hit pause on a major product development effort in order to go back and re-evaluate some of our vendor choices. Specifically to see how we can eliminate as many dependencies on US companies as possible. Fortunately we were relatively early in a 18-24 month development cycle for a somewhat complex hardware device.
The company already started a project two months ago to look at how we can migrate off AWS and Azure and instead use domestic alternatives for our online systems.
For the hardware components this is a bit more work, but it looks like we can find replacements for most of the key items. Though there are a few components where we would have to rearchitect some of the systems to eliminate US components.
For us it is simple: we need stability and predictability. We have long development cycles and long lifecycles for the things we make. Stopping development and trying to eliminate things that depend on the US is a bit unreal and shocking, but management have to deal with the world as it is.
I know some of my colleagues at other companies in the sector are going through similar exercises.
Right now changes are taking place that will not be visible for years, but that will stick around for decades. The current administration in the US is doing real, long term damage to the US.
It is really weird for us (Europeans) to read hacker news and it see mostly indifference to what is happening in your country. You probably should worry a bit more about this than you do.
beloch
You also wouldn't go out of your way to piss off America's two biggest export markets: Canada and Mexico. As it stands, not only are there significant counter-tariffs that would make U.S. manufacturers even less competitive in Canada[1], there is significant consumer backlash to anything American-made where, just a couple months ago, products "Made in the U.S.A." would have been viewed favourably[2].
The way Trump has done things, any company that manufactures in the U.S. had better be able to get by with just the domestic U.S. market, because exports to Canada and Mexico aren't likely to be significant for quite some time, even if Trump backs off quickly. Lasting damage has already been done.
________________________
[1]It remains to be seen if Mexico will eventually retaliate.
[2]Perhaps not favourably in terms of price/quality competitiveness, but certainly in a geopolitical "support your neighbour instead of China" sense.
yibg
It also breaks a lot of the way businesses make and sell stuff today.
For example, several car makers makes cars in Canada, Mexico and the US but sells them across the borders (and globally). Honda makes Civics and CRVs in Canada but sells them in the US, but the Accord is made in the US and sold in Canada. So now if there are tariffs on car imports and especially if there is also a reciprocal tariff, Honda gets hit both ways. What would they do? Make some civics in the US and some in Canada? Seems very inefficient.
cavisne
Factually despite all the noise there are no significant tariffs in either direction at this point in time, 98% of trade is tariff free under the free trade agreement. Mexico and to a lesser degree Canada are in a more favorable position than they were before the tariffs as they are the only countries in this position [1]
[1] https://semianalysis.com/2025/04/10/tariff-armageddon-gpu-lo...
cmrdporcupine
My experience is this: The majority of Americans have a hard time believing we (Canada) are their biggest export market and trading partner generally. Because they barely think about Canada, and when they do it's as a quaint and cold place of no real importance to them.
And this perception has worked in Trump's favour. "Those weak irrelevant people up there are taking advantage of us, time to teach them a lesson" works well when the people you're telling it to don't realize "those people" are their single biggest customer and a source of wealth for them.
American business people aren't generally accustomed to treating their customers this way. I hope they come to their senses.
cogman10
> which industries you wanted to develop
yup
> probably subsidise them
yup
> communicate very clearly what you were going to do
Probably not. At least, not until right before the ratchet up. You'd want to first subsidize then once industries are starting to build up, you'd want to start the ratchet up. You probably also wouldn't want to say "We are doing this because we want to be better competitors" or whatever. It'd be better if you said something like "We believe country x is doing terrible thing y and for the safety of our country and others we are going to apply a tariff on good z until x stops doing y".
But yeah, universal tariffs are the dumbest idea in the world. We've essentially sanctioned every single nation which is going to massively damage us and manufacturing. Going to be real hard to unwind this.
notahacker
You might add a bit of "Country X" is bad spin in there as political justification for what you're doing, agreed.
But you would make damn sure you communicated when the tariffs would hit punitive levels so the rest of the value chain knew and had already had chances to find themselves domestic suppliers
ntonozzi
Wouldn't you prioritize subsidizing local production over taxing foreign production? It just seems like a much cleaner and more straightforward way to increase local production. It seems like this has been at least somewhat effective with semiconductors over the past ten years. And then you don't have the risk of harming consumers. Everybody wins!
cogman10
Its why China is technologically eating everyone else's lunch when it comes to renewables and battery tech. Their government dumped massive amounts of money into R&D and building out manufacturing and mining infrastructure.
Heck, it's why the US has been (not for long) a leader in medicine. We've historically dumped huge amounts of money into medical research through the NIH.
Biomedical companies don't like research, they like making money. Research is expensive and by its nature filled with deadends. A biomedical companies would much rather take and run with cheap (to them) NIH research.
beeflet
Because when you subsidize, the taxpayer is paying for it. You are socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.
Whereas in a tariff situation, you are penalizing the consumer for creating an externality (foreign dependence).
marcosdumay
The US got dominance over the entire world's economy, an unprecedented amount of weal, and almost complete technological dominance with high taxation and direct intervention on the market. And even more, they then taught it to Japan who came and repeated basically the exact same actions with basically the exact same result. Oh, yeah, and then China did it...
Then they organized a bunch of morons to create an school teaching not to do that, celebrated them so they would teach every foreign school, and managed to stop most of the world from competing with them. But a couple of decades later everybody in a position of power there was a moron from that school.
njarboe
The resources for subsidies come from the taxpayer. Plus how you and who you subsidize becomes political. Lots of complications.
rtkwe
Subsidization also makes products viable outside of the tariff bubble where tariffs can only really make it viable to places with the same tariffs against the same source(s).
Taniwha
If you really wanted to fix the US economy you'd uncouple the $ from the oil markets and let it float downward - the cost of imports would go up and exporters would earn more (and be more competitive in their domestic markets). The BTW is why China is pushing the yuan down now, because unlike Trump, they understand how this stuff works.
Trade imbalances are simply currency imbalances that haven't been allowed to find their own levels - what you can't do is have an artificially high currency (by requiring all global oil sales be made in it, creating an artificial scarcity) and not have a trade deficit - you can't have your cake and eat it too
freeone3000
The dollar is kept artificially strong through oil, so america can maintain an effectively infinite debt and an arbitrarily large deficit without the dollar ever weakening despite how much is printed…
I’m sure this sounds bad to someone, but if I was America, I wouldn’t try to put the gift horse into the wood chipper.
suraci
> uncouple the $ from the oil markets and let it float downward - the cost of imports would go up and exporters would earn more
can you explain it with more details?
troyvit
I don't know if that's true, but it sure is more well thought out than what the US is currently doing. You have my vote.
pton_xd
> If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate very clearly what you were going to do and then ratchet up the tariffs on those specific finishes products, whilst being sure to maintain access to raw materials and components you still needed.
I'm not here to defend the current approach, but what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward?
wat10000
The whole idea of the government bringing manufacturing back to the US is central planning. The free market approach is to remove barriers to trade and let things develop as they may.
surgical_fire
> what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward?
What they are describing is basically what every sane government does, and what the US used to do until, er, a few months ago.
If you consider most western countries to be centrally planned communist states (including the US up until very recently), then I don't have anything else to argue.
com2kid
Kind of line railroads, or ship building, or the spice trade, or automotive manufacturing, or agriculture in general.
Nuclear power. Solar panels. CPU manufacturing. Weapons manufacturing. Biomed research.
Capitol intensive projects require coordination. Especially projects that can take decades before they pay off.
lbotos
If you do this to the entire economy, yes sure, fair. If you decide that you want Americans to eat American garlic and you give garlic farmers a tax break or grants to buy seed and fertilizer I wouldn't call that central planning. More "strategic investment".
Replace garlic with whatever industry it is that the gov wants to strategically invest in: semiconductors, automobiles, aerospace, weapons, renewable energy.
cogman10
I dislike this sort of binary thinking. It's why we are having the problems we have.
Just because some industry gets subsidized and/or ran by the government, doesn't mean we are now all communists. Every government has SOME industry that is ultimately state ran. Fire departments, police, and education are prime examples of nearly universally state ran systems.
There are some industries that just, frankly, work better when state directed, not all of them, but a few. Private fire departments don't work, neither do private police departments.
This is not nor has it ever been an all or nothing thing.
croisillon
yeah i was thinking subsidizing is exactly what the European Union does, which as everyone knows is very much a radical left soviet like institution
suraci
[flagged]
ahmeneeroe-v2
>If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd...
Sure this seems like a great way for if you can sustain a multi-decade effort
If you have 3.5 years to re-negotiate a deal, maybe you need to move faster.
notahacker
If you're spending 3.5 years trying to "renegotiate a deal", you don't have a strategy to bring manufacturing back. If you change your policy multiple times in a week you don't even have a strategy.
Easier to onshore manufacturing with multi-year timelines, but you don't need multi-year timelines to impose tariffs on carefully selected industries, not penguins and your existing industries' key suppliers.
realusername
Bringing back such industry would take a multi decade effort, in the best scenario (which the US clearly isn't now)
pjc50
I don't think it's physically possible to move much manufacturing in that time. If you think it is, please give estimates in dollar values, number of jobs, and square footage of factory construction expected.
2muchcoffeeman
Are the commenters defending the chaos serious or just trolls?
bryanlarsen
Previous government efforts do not need to be sabotaged every time there's an election. For example, when Biden came in he didn't immediately unwind all of Trump's industrial efforts. He kept the China tariffs, and built on top of them with the CHIPS act to add the "carrot" part of "carrot and stick".
ty6853
The business decision of these tariffs very well be to just offshore American operations altogether. Better to keep most the world market and lose America. It's not a given businesses will choose to invest in an isolationist country even if they are from there if protectionist policies they may benefit from narrow their horizons.
raincom
Most of the demand (in terms of dollars/euros) is confined to the developed world. What happens when both US and EU want to bring back operations back to the home countries? Then these companies are left with serving less of the global demand.
TOMDM
If the tarrifs stay high, then US consumption will plummet since all goods will now be that much more expensive and people won't be able to afford as much.
If tariffs go down then moving manufacturing to the US was the losing choice for any company that chooses to do so.
Either way betting on current US consumption levels with US manufactured goods is a losing bet.
seanmcdirmid
They invest in Africa and Southeast Asia, and everywhere else that isn’t American/Western Europe, and create demand that way. What do you Xi has been doing for the last 10+ years with Silk Road? China already had a plan for this trade war.
JamisonM
The Europeans seem to have become more free trade curious after recent events so this doesn't seem like it will hold up as a "what if". And I expect that the coming months of US-only inflation are just going to confirm that position for them even i they face a mild recession due to US market access/demand collapse issues.
sosowegowelp
Only about 1B people in EU+US. Majority of people only need one phone. If I were a cell manufacturer, I'd drive down costs to service the other 7B people.
Of course, you won't make the same margins as EU+US business. Not sure if that is enough incentive to onshore consumer manufacturing.
ajross
Sure, but say it is: you assume a long-term trade barrier with China, invest in US factories and employee training, bring folks in from outside, start your production, get some competitive wins in the domestic (but obviously not international!) electronics market...
Then some future administration decides on detent and signs a free trade agreement to open markets or whatnot, yada yada. China marches right in and eats your lunch. Again.
Trade barriers do not do anything to address fundamental inequities in production efficiency. To be blunt: China is great at making electronics not because they have all the talent. They have all the talent because China is poor, still. The US is not (though it looks like we're aiming that way). Ergo Chinese production efficiency will be higher.
What trade barriers with China actually do isn't to bring manufacturing back to the US, of course. It's to move production from China to Vietnam or the Philippines or India or wherever isn't tariffed. Then of course we'll need to apply tariffs to them, and so on.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
Doesn't need to move production to Vietnam. Needs to move finished product to Vietnam and replace "Made in China" sticker with "Made in Vietnam" one.
As to the poor part, after Xi is done with dumping treasuries, and subsequent US default and USD cratering, the salaries would be on par on both sides of the ocean (as they should be).
Which would also automatically solve the illegal immigration problem. And fentanyl problem (no money no honey).
amluto
> They have all the talent because China is poor, still.
That’s why China has (somewhat) inexpensive labor. It does not explain why China has far more plastic engineering talent, electrical engineering talent, etc than the US.
ajross
They have more talent because that's where talent is needed. You don't staff factories with "talent", you staff them with labor. Then you need "talent" to design the process. It all feeds back. We used to have injection molding plastic experts in the US in the 70's! The technology was invented here. But they all retired and no one stepped in to replace them because those factories all closed down. Chinese kids picked up the slack.
The US wasn't sleeping though. We trained a generation of software engineering talent that remains the envy of the world. There are whole web sites devoted to this "Hacker" subculture, even. Maybe we can find one.
Seriously: there's no problem here. This is the way economies work.
blitzar
5x the population and an education system that hasn't spent the last 50 years teaching science from the bible.
intrasight
They have more engineers because they need more engineers
seanmcdirmid
China really isn’t that poor anymore. A lot of their recent productivity gains are coming from automation, and they are leaning into harder than the Japanese did in the 90s.
nylonstrung
Even with automation and high tech industry, their GDP per capita (both nominal and PPP) is equivalent to that of Mexico
The average household income in China is equivalent to making $17K salary in the US, and on average, Chinese work 25% more hours than Americans
Average home in their Tier 1 cities is 20x annual salary, compared to a 7x ratio in NYC
It's still pretty bleak for the average person there- you see that reflected in the "let it rot" youth movement online
ajross
Chinese wages remain about 6-10x lower than US workers expect for the same kind of job. Whether that's "poor" or not is arguable. There are much poorer nations. Nonetheless US wage levels simply aren't going to compete, and it isn't even close.
realusername
> or wherever isn't tariffed.
Since he's even taxing empty islands, I doubt the end result will be anything else than either not selling to the US or selling to the US with a grey market.
If you put tariffs on the whole world, it's basically the same thing as a global economic sanction, similar to what Russia suffered.
GaggiX
We don't know what will happen in three days at this point.
yibg
In addition, by definition if the only way to bring manufacturing back to the US is by putting up import barriers, it means US manufacturing isn't competitive, domestically or globally.
Unless there is some hunker down period of isolation that'll make US manufacturing globally competitive somehow, all this will do in the long run is either isolate US manufacturers to the domestic market, or provide a temporary advantage that will disappear the minute the barriers are dropped.
DonHopkins
Make that 145%. Until next week.
null
timewizard
> That uncertainty does not create stable markets.
Stable markets with bad outcomes are not worth defending on stability alone.
> It does not create very accurate business decisions
The business environment is not great. It does seem some part of that is the result of cheap Chinese goods that have displaced labor _and_ environmental costs flooding foreign markets. That China even uses proxy countries to push out even more is instructive.
So, if not tariffs, then what should we use to solve this?
grey-area
Oh I don’t know, how about:
Not imposing ludicrous tariffs based on flawed economics on the entire world at once?
Not imposing tariffs with no warning on your closest allies and attempting to bully them into submission?
Not imposing huge tariffs on some of the weakest nations you trade with (e.g. Laos, Vietnam).
Not changing trade policy radically every few days and announcing it on social media?
Not crashing the stock market, announcing a reverse on your social media platform, then boasting about how much money your billionaire friends made?
Not calling one of your largest trading partners peasants and the then very clever, alternating between insults and praise like a two-bit mobster?
This administration has made America a laughing stock; I don’t think many Americans realise just how much trust has been burned with allies since ‘liberation day’.
_carbyau_
Allies saw Trump the first time around.
The simple fact Trump was voted in again denotes that the people of the US is not to be trusted.
At this point, it doesn't matter if Trump disappears into a void at the end of his term.
22% of people in the US voted directly for Trump. That's 22% of people that think his mode of operating is great presidential material.
I cannot trust doing business in a society with such a large proportion of either idiocy or malice, which includes wealthy and influential individuals!
The last 15 years has changed the fundamental stereotype of a US citizen. And while I personally know a few US citizens who are trustworthy, competent, lovely people, this marks an inherent bias in decision making.
From here, whatever Trump does is simply reinforcing the stereotype.
timewizard
> based on flawed economics
It's a simple formula based on balance of trade.
> tariffs with no warning
Some Hacker News types like to bury their head in the sand when inconvenient political news occurs but to say this happened without warning simply flags you as part of this group.
> on some of the weakest nations you trade with (e.g. Laos, Vietnam).
There is room for these countries to buy more American goods. These two countries also rebadge and ship out a lot of Chinese goods to evade tariffs.
> changing trade policy radically every few days and announcing it on social media?
So, do you want warnings, or not?
> Not crashing the stock market, announcing a reverse on your social media platform, then boasting about how much money your billionaire friends made?
If you didn't make any trades during this period how was your portfolio actually impacted? I would assume this is the majority of non billionaire investors. So the only ones who lost in the crash were the same billionaires.
> calling one of your largest trading partners peasants and the then very clever, alternating between insults and praise like a two-bit mobster?
Does that trading partner also act like a two bit mobster? If so, wouldn't this just be turnabout, or why is deference to hostile economic partners justified?
> has made America a laughing stock
That's an absurdly biased point of view.
> I don’t think many Americans realise just how much trust has been burned with allies since ‘liberation day’.
Not much. They didn't actually "trust" us before. I'm not sure how you'd measure that anyways. From my reading of foreign news they're mostly taking it in stride, having seen this coming since last year, and not being particularly surprised by it. This zeitgeist only exists in half of America right now.
buu700
* Lower corporate income tax to the global minimum of 15%
* Reshoring incentives
* Regulatory reform to remove barriers to building things
* Strict export controls around AI, robotics, and fusion
* Massive subsides for production of useful humanoid robots and deployment of useful fusion power generation
To the extent that tariffs are considered at all, it should only be if they're implemented with bipartisan support, selective with specific strategic goals in mind, gradually phased in, and explicitly long-term policy. Extreme tariffs without clear staying power are just disruptive for no good reason. They won't change business behavior; they'll just temporarily jack up costs, create an unnecessary customs backlog, and roadblock some commercial activities entirely.
Even if implemented carefully, I would argue that tariffs in general are counterproductive in the long run. If a domestic industry isn't internationally competitive, the goal should be to fix that, not insulate it from competition.
thebruce87m
> So, if not tariffs, then what should we use to solve this?
I’d argue that tariffs that increase at a known rate are better than surprise large ones. Even a 1% increase a week every Monday for a year lets everyone’s supply chain adjust gradually. You’ll know within a few weeks how your product is affected and you’ll plan for the increase over the year. That’s probably still too fast though, since factories take time to build and the whole point is to encourage local manufacturing. Given the 4 year term trump could have gone for 3 years of increases with the hope that companies would start building factories and have them running by year 4.
gmm1990
Maybe start with smaller tariffs and go from there. But its not even worth defending current administration policies. Its either completely stupid or deliberately malevolent.
ahmeneeroe-v2
On what basis are you making this recommendation? Your personal experience negotiating nation-state level agreements between two hegemons?
analog31
If an entrepreneur is smart enough to figure out how to land a rocket ship on its feet, that person can figure out how to manufacture printed circuit boards economically in the US.
ben_w
One is a fight against nature; the other — to make it economic — is a fight against all the other highly skilled entrepreneurs not in the USA.
Single player, multiplayer.
nickpsecurity
I'll add that the elites who pushed for earlier trade deals often did it specifically to get rich selling off America's domestic manufacturing and many jobs. Now, countries like China have them.
So, Trump's policies should be seen as an attempt to reverse for Americans' benefit damaging policies from before which are still active. Now, whether that will do good or harm in the long term is anyone's guess. We already see companies investing more in American infrastructure, though.
tcherasaro
As one of the “skilled electronics engineers” in the US you could count on US soil (whatever that means) I can tell you this article reads very strangely to a EE.
“we were able to take all those designs and spin up our own SMT, it's called Surface Mount Technology”
“run that through our surface mount technology by our line operators”
“meaning the printed circuit board or PCBA assembly”
So, he’s definitely not an EE. No EE talks like this when they are trying to explain the nuts and bolts to a lay person. Either that or the editor took liberties they shouldn’t have.
donnachangstein
No one ever said he was an EE?
It's a transcript of an informal podcast interview with - clearly - a marketing guy who may or may not have 'engineer' in his title.
I've worked with dozens of guys like this over the years. They could elegantly bullshit their way through any discussion. They had an answer for every question, even when they didn't.
There's a reason they don't send the design engineers to trade shows.
Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.
Not that any of that matters, because engineering is a team sport, and that's where taking this too literally becomes a problem. Just how like a football team is made up of different skills and varying physical builds. The reason they don't send the design engineers to the conventions is because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details.
danso
> * Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.*
Before Apple entered its iPod era, Jobs could do a reasonable job of taking questions from a technical audience
dogma1138
No single person on this planet can know everything about a product as complex as a phone or any other modern device, and the expectation of some people form execs even ones who were engineers is simply unrealistic.
If you know everything about your product down to the most low level technical detail your product is either a brick (and I think that even that is too complicated) or you greatly overestimate what you actually know.
dmix
> because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details
Yeah, getting upset an EE who has the skills to build a cellphone from scratch isn't actually moonlighting as a writer doing a blogspam version of a podcast interview fits that quite well
sambeau
Steve Jobs was not a marketing guy. If anything, he was a designer. His technical knowledge was also way beyond most CEOs. He designed his presentations with a high attention to detail just like he designed his products, product ranges and companies. If you watch any one of the many interviews he gave you'll see that he can talk off-the-cuff, in depth on all kinds of subjects. And, unlike many modern CEOs, he pauses to think before opening his mouth.
reaperducer
Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting.
That's the currently-fashionable revisionist history. But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff. He was also good at marketing.
I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations,
I suggest going back and re-reading some of the print interviews he gave to technical publications. There's no question he knew what he was talking about.
soperj
> But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff.
Read anything on folklore.org, and you can see that's not really the case. He prescribes a lot of stuff that they just had to get around, typical pointy haired boss stuff.
pqtyw
> A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting
We can call product design "marketing" but that's a bit like calling Linus Torvalds a "code monkey"...
entropicdrifter
Steve Jobs was not a product designer. He emphasized design, but he didn't design almost anything himself.
thenthenthen
There are even more than a million of those in SZ haha
tdeck
You're just jealous. These guys have spun up their own RoHS and are doing a 100% EDA automation with full Verilog over there. By doing the reflow process (it's a way of building integrated circuits) they're able to offer complete impedance right here in the USA.
Tade0
Before retirement my father was employed in a company certifying medical devices.
Half the descriptions provided by those who made the devices were this sort of word salad because they concerned products which were obvious scams[0].
On person in particular was editing the description on the fly and was looking for a word so dad jokingly suggested "impedance". "Yes, thank you!" replied that person - her face lighting up as she added the word.
[0] Like a vacuum cleaner which was supposed to dispense a mist of medication. Initially rejected as there was no dosage control whatsoever, but I heard that eventually somehow it was certified.
turtledragonfly
Go back to /r/vxjunkies/, and take your retro-encabulator with you :Þ
esperent
In case anyone need it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/4zzfp4/what_i...
hn_go_brrrrr
I was fully expecting "inverse reluctance" to make an appearance somewhere in there.
_fizz_buzz_
Too much impedance is outsourced to Asia these days …
tdeck
It's a complex problem, there's a lot of resistance from consumers who react badly to the price of domestic goods. Maybe tariffs will induce more demand, but I'm not sure the capacity is there in the first place.
apercu
Amazing. I'm not an EE and the first half of that sentence had be believing you.
croemer
I hope you're joking - what you wrote makes no sense at all.
dragontamer
Thanks. I hate it.
Have my upvote.
Taniwha
You're mixing your processes - is he making his own circuit boards (reflow) or making his own chips (verilog) - and I have no idea what "complete impedance" even means in this context - HN really needs to stop AI posting here
tdeck
Buddy that was exactly the joke. I do proudly make up my own nonsense without relying on AI, though.
em3rgent0rdr
tdeck is making fun of the way the article is written.
igor47
Woosh
numpad0
tbf, GP could have had just a bit more absurdity to clarify it has been a joke.
squigz
GP was a joke, mate.
Animats
Indeed.
There's a somewhat better discussion of this phone here.[1] At least the making of the board. Board manufacture, SMT pick and place, and soldering are all automated, and the equipment is widely available. Everybody does boards roughly the same way.
The assembly problems in phones come from all the non-board parts. See this iPhone teardown.[2] Look at all those little subassemblies. Some are screwed down. Some use elastic adhesive. Some are held in place by other parts. They're connected by tiny flexible printed circuits. That's the labor-intensive part. Usually involves lots of people with tweezers and magnifiers. They don't show that.
So here's that part of assembly in a phone factory in India.[3] Huge workforce.
For comparison, here's a Samsung plant.[4] More robots, fewer people. Samsung made something like 229 million phones in 2024. If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.
[1] https://puri.sm/posts/manufacturing-the-librem-5-usa-phone-i...
[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+13+Pro+Teardown/14492...
Animats
There's another way to do it. Here's a teardown of a classic Nokia "brick" phone.[1] That's designed for automated low-cost vertical assembly. The case provides the basic structure, and everything can be put into the case with a vertical push. There are no internal wires to connect. There are simple machines for that kind of assembly. Then everything gets squeezed together, and you have a hard block of an object that's hard to damage.
If you can design something which can be assembled in that simple way, high-volume manufacturing can be automated cheaply. Smartphones are not built from parts intended to be assembled in that way, but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design.
Design for assembly was more of a thing when manufacturing was in the US. The Macintosh IIci was designed for vertical assembly. Everything installed with a straight-down move. The power supply outputs were stakes that engaged clips on the motherboard. No internal wiring.
Then Apple gave up on US manufacturing.
lugu
The trade-off of the current smartphone assembly process (many parts and many steps) is driven by numerous factors, including cheap labor. It also considers: incremental design improvement, testing, defects, supply chain, model differenciation, ...
topspin
"but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design"
This is the heart of the matter. The US has abandoned skills because cheap labor in Asia. An example from the story about dealing with touch screen tests: they're employing disposable workers to toy with pinch and zoom testing; something easily automated with a simple machine and image comparisons. How sad. This is an actual regression in technology.
ksec
>Then Apple gave up on US manufacturing.
Then Tim Cook gave up on manufacturing. Which was how it saved Apple.
Steve Jobs always had a somewhat fantasise vision of dark factory. He wasn't able to accomplish that when Apple was still fighting for survival. But now Apple has more cash then it knows what to do with it.
p_l
a bit of the problem is that modern elements like display + touch screen require a lot more bandwidth than 3110 - for example the displays require ridiculous bandwidth in comparison to the nokia, like 10 gigabit/s for Samsung Galaxy S25 (basic model, not plus/ultra), plus connectors for the cameras.
At the very least you can't really make the screen soldered-on, and the simple connectors used in Nokia might not work out for such high bandwidth use case. Same with cameras.
Thin ribbon connectors are one of the hardest things to automate from what I remember regarding Sony's efforts to automate PS5 manufacture.
mschuster91
> If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.
The problem is, there are no Western manufacturers left that have the brand loyalty to bring such a large volume of purchases to the table.
The giants are so giant, it's almost impossible to compete with them in the consumer mass market. The only way you can outcompete the giants is by focusing on tiny small niches where consumers are willing and able to pay a premium - the government (auditable supply chains) and eco-progressives. That's where Tesla started, that's where Purism and Frame.work live.
trelane
> The giants are so giant, it's almost impossible to compete with them in the consumer mass market
Chicken, egg
tonyedgecombe
>More robots, fewer people.
It would be amusing if after all this turmoil the work came back to the US but it barely increased manufacturing employment.
bildung
Your scenario is more like a best-case option, actually. I mean currently there are only 13M people employed in manufacturing in the US [0], while output is at an all time high [1]. The vast majority of this manufacturing is dependent on components imported from other countries - which just got much more expensive. So even if employment in manufacuturing would increase by 20% (unrealistic IMO), that would only translate to 2.6M people - while at the same time losing multiples of that in better-paid jobs in other industries, mostly services.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...
delfinom
Pretty much guaranteed. The goal of modern automation isn't more people it's less. People love to spout "but the industrial revolution just made people able to do more jobs". But the goal of modern automation is to _replace all jobs_ that it can.
Then you hire 4 guys to maintain all the automation between 5 factories they drive between as needed.
alchemist1e9
The goal isn’t actually specifically employment increases, that’s mostly a marketing strategy, the real goal is national security. US, Japan, and South Korea seem to have decided enough is enough with Chinese aspirations and threats to Taiwan, so US has convinced them to build additional capacity in the US and also to have those nations increase defense spending. Notice Japan has started joining NATO command and participating in NATO missions. I predict Japan will the be first “deal” announced by Trump administration, with South Korea soon afterwards. It makes sense for these allies, the logic is we should fortify our supply lines building redundant facilities in US homeland which is much harder for China to disrupt and attack, you guys start buying lots of F-47s, we start massive ship building, re-industrialize as rapidly as possible. Then should China try anything and somehow mess you guys up, the US will come back a get you out of it.
snotrockets
It won’t come back, as it never were in the US.
numpad0
I don't buy that [3] is bad and [4] is good examples. That Samsung plant reel doesn't show the same parts of assembly as the first one - I bet those videos are just focusing on different parts of fundamentally identical factories.
Saigonautica
I was going to skip this article until I read your post, it got me curious. You're totally right, it does read really weird. It made me laugh a bit, I needed that this morning. Thanks!
I have also "spun up my own SMT". It's a 50 USD hot air rework station and maybe 20$ of consumables in a 4 meter square workshop (I live in Asia). It would be challenging, but possible, for me to assemble the PCBs in their photographs by hand. There are indeed a lot of people like me.
varjag
He certainly meant an "SMT line", because phones assembled on a manual station in the USA (outside of shit quality) would cost well in excess of $2000.
fooker
> There are indeed a lot of people like me.
Are there a lot of people like you that are willing to do this as a minimum wage job? Because that's the real ask.
iszomer
They might, if their expectations are as simple as an on ramp to better or more stable things. It would also make sense for those who are using this method for career change.
I have a coworker who "couldn't hack it" as a paralegal and is now working in the line for server assembly. Or another coworker who came from a major daytrading firm to work quality control with me.
camillomiller
That’s not what they do. As Tim Cook said multiple times the engineers are needed as floor and line managers, to coordinate parts of the process, to set up new lines quickly etc… those are not the ones doing the actual soldering.
thenthenthen
Do what? There are literally thousands of shops here in SZ where ppl are manually hot air reworking phone pcbs 24/7. For maybe 150 dollar a month?
suzzer99
How hard can it be? Just tell them where to put the solder.
somenameforme
It extrapolates broadly. It's kind of a funny thing. When somebody doesn't know much about something but wants to pretend they do, their vocabulary comes off sounding like a thesaurus of vernacular, but when you speak to somebody who genuinely knows something, to the point of having an intuitive feeling/understanding of it, they could easily explain, at least roughly, even the most esoteric topic in a relatable enough language that a high schooler could understand.
Space stuff is another domain that's just chock full of this.
watwut
I don't think this is true. Knowing something well and being able to explain it in simple terms are unrelated skills. Plenty of people who know their domain super well just can't explain to lay person.
vacuity
You're right. Recently there was a thread about how some (many?) people know a field well but can't teach well, and some people know and teach well.
brookst
What, you’ve never dip switched the manufacturing process despite investor resistors?
DonHopkins
Quick, fetch the firewall extinguisher! The AmeriPad is having an unplanned thermal excursion!
amatecha
The interviewee is described as "Purism's founder", who even says "we took our own electronics engineers (EEs)", implying (though not explicitly stating) he doesn't include himself in that category.
killjoywashere
I do think there's an interesting conversation to have here though about workforce management, as someone who lives in adjacent worlds.
If you are long term greedy, like China, a great strategy to capture dominance of a discipline would be along the lines of how to boil a frog. Start by sending grad students to the top universities, ensuring they work for the PIs for cheap, bring as many of them back to China as you can, but tolerate a leaky return path so as not to stir up notice. Advertize their high post-training employment rate back to the universities to keep their valves open even as you start developing your universities internally, and eventually throttle down the outbound grad student pipeline. At some point after it's too late, the top universities, and their countries, look around, bemoan the lack of people in their discipline, and then just give up because by now they're old and tired.
Seems like something that has happened in chemistry, physics, and EE for sure. Once you start thinking this way, all sorts of things start making sense. Like maybe they looked at solar as a cheap, low threat point of entry for developing silicon fabrication capabilities. Software engineering, being a relatively soft skill, comes along for the ride.
Not sure about other fields, but if AI can take on a rapidly increasing set of fields, you start seeing this as how China primarily harvests not IP but workforce training from the global West, then technologies happen to fall out, then one day China has solved for their own graying work force at the same time they've solved for global economic dominance.
And a non-trivial contributor was the US governments (I blame the states too) defunding education.
Liftyee
This is an interesting suggestion. I'm curious what you mean by "sending grad students to top universities": 1.) the target universities have to accept the students, right? 2.) This implies some top-level RTS-game-esque control of the grad students when, in reality, they're making independent choices (albeit influenced by many factors, including govt promotion) 3.) Seems like the rational decision for ambitious grad students is to apply to said top universities (which may just happen to be abroad).
Same for "bringing many of them back": I read it at first like it was akin to some sort of spy agent network when in reality "bringing back" probably means various incentives, not some forced thing. Carrot, instead of stick.
killjoywashere
1) target universities have to accept the students
Yes! Which the US incentivizes by a) underfunding K-12 education, reducing the internal applicant pool, b) competing grants in a way that incentivizes PIs to grasp for cheap labor. Additionally, the individual states also incentivize this. Look at the UC's own statistics: since 2009 the highest chance of acceptance goes to foreign, ethnically Asian applicants. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321493
2) RTS-game-esque control of the grad students
Yes! Having been in the room when one of those grad students got a very stressful call from home (like broke down crying multiple times), it's definitely not all carrots. And the removal of carrots eventually looks like a stick.
3) Seems like the rational decision for ambitious grad students
Yes! No amplification needed.
markus_zhang
Interesting. It is impressive that they almost managed to do 100% made in the USA, judging by the "Table of Origin". However the table doesn't really cover all the details down to the components, so I'm wondering where he sourced every small details.
He did include one paragraph on the website:
"Individual components used in fabrication are sourced direct from chip makers and parts distributors."
nickff
For reference, the table is on this page: https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/?ref=404media.co
Todd Weaver is vastly exaggerating how special, innovative, and skilled Librem is. Their components are largely sourced from overseas, through domestic distributors, which is the norm for electronics manufacturers; overseas distributors are often precluded from international sales by agreements with their suppliers. There are also far more skilled electronics designers in the USA than he seems to think.
Source: I am an embedded developer, who works on a research, design, and development team which includes electronics engineers, and works on products manufactured in the same facility.
Aurornis
> There are also far more skilled electronics designers in the USA than he seems to think.
Second this. The Liberty Phone PCBA isn't even that exotic as far as modern designs go. The NXP SoC (CPU) it uses is a common part with a rather pedestrian ball pitch. A board like this is within the reach of countless trained EEs here, but they're usually happily employed at companies with higher volumes and margins. This often translates to a perception that they don't exist in the US market when low-budget companies go looking.
8n4vidtmkvmk
I thought the phrasing of "western distributor" was shady. I'm like doesn't that just mean the person ordering and distrusting the parts is "in the west" (not even necessarily US) but the parts could be from anywhere? It's not saying much at all.
Suppafly
>"Individual components used in fabrication are sourced direct from chip makers and parts distributors."
I suspect most of those are from overseas. A lot of that stuff just isn't made in the US. I don't know why they are shady about it, they should just be honest and denote which stuff isn't available at all in the US and which stuff isn't available at reasonable costs in the US.
fecal_henge
Are there any other ways to source components?
nelblu
> It has 4 GB of memory, and reviewers say that its specs are pretty outdated.
In my imaginary world, I wish someone stood up to this type of insanity. This would be a good time to force Apple / Google to revive old devices and allow the supply chains to adjust manufacturing things outside of China while the rest of the world pauses and lives with some outdated hardware technology. I know this is probably not feasible because Apple and Google probably survive on selling of new phones, but hey I can at least dream!
guywithahat
In this case, part of the criticism is that the phone doesn't function well. Even when it was new, it was slow and clunky, and the issue seemed to be the CPU wasn't up to the task. They may have optimized it a bit since, but fundamentally they chose an under-powered CPU to hit certain open source requirements.
I agree though that for many things (such as their laptop), specs often don't matter. Either I need a high-end, GPU accelerated computer, or I need a terminal. Having the newest CPU doesn't matter if it achieves other desired goals.
fsflover
> and the issue seemed to be the CPU wasn't up to the task.
This is definitely not true, the issue is in the non-optimized software. I tried SXMo [0] on a Pinephone (which is much slower than the Librem), and it was unbelievably fast, including watching videos and looking a maps in a split-screen mode, simultaneously and smoothly. Android had 10 years and a huge team of developers to optimize the UI.
nolist_policy
Sxmo is based on a keyboard-driven tiling window manager. Yes, it is as bad as it sounds. Touch gestures suck so much[1] that the most comfortable way to navigate it is with the volume buttons and power button. Each of these buttons has like 3 different functions with double, tripple click etc. Changing the volume is not one of the functions[2].
Auto screen orientation only works 50% of the time, because the whole thing is based on a pile of shell scripts.
There is no lock screen included.
No, I'm not kidding.
[1] https://sxmo.org/docs/gettingstarted/
[2] https://man.sr.ht/~anjan/sxmo-docs/USERGUIDE.md#strongglobal...
viktorcode
Are you going to use a 10 years old phone just because it still receives software updates? If so, good for you, but overwhelming majority of people will opt buying a new one.
poincaredisk
Why buy a new phone when old one still receives updated and has a working battery? Honest question, I only replaced my old phone because it stopped getting security updated. Up to some limit, ancient nokia wouldn't work well, but i would gladly use my pixel from 2018.
fsflover
What's the point in buying a new phone when the old one works flawlessly and continues to receive not only security updates but also all software improvements, and is getting more optimized and fast with time? Sent from my Librem 5.
nektro
consumers were taught that and they can be taught something different
ein0p
There are plenty of EEs in the good ol' US of A, they're just working as software engineers at the moment out of necessity, since there aren't really any EE jobs here, outside the defense sector and a few large companies.
But that is beside the point since it's not "EE" that's being done in China. It's manufacturing and assembly of US designs. And that is where there's real shortage - skilled labor that can do that. The actual work is mostly done by robots, but before it _is_ done by robots, manufacturing capacity needs to be designed and built. Under the best circumstances (e.g. unlimited Apple resources in India) this takes years.
vdfs
From the article: "If you scoured the United States, you would be able to probably actually still count the number of skilled electronics engineers. If you go to Shenzhen, there's floor after floor after floor after floor of skilled EE's"
aleph_minus_one
> And that is where there's real shortage - skilled labor that can do that.
Rather: cheap (US) labor that can do that. :-)
ein0p
I don't even think it's the cost. The actual formerly labor-intensive work is mostly done by robots now (save for e.g. the garment industry which is still only very partially automated). It's just that anything in the physical world takes time and effort. As software engineers we're used to quick iteration cycles in everything. It might not seem to you that they are "quick", but compared to the physical world they are. I was first exposed to this when I worked for a "mostly hardware" company that also designs chips. They were going to introduce some features into the chips that I needed on the software side, and when asked about the timeline they said "3-4 years". Not a typo. That's how it is in hardware. I have no reason to believe that the timelines are substantially shorter in large scale high tech manufacturing - it's just the nature of the thing. You fuck something up, you can't just patch it, you have to re-do it, and that takes time and $$$.
Be all of that as it may, we still _have_ to revitalize the "real" segment of our industry, no matter the cost.
aleph_minus_one
> As software engineers we're used to quick iteration cycles in everything. It might not seem to you that they are "quick", but compared to the physical world they are.
That's also partly because (physical world) engineers don't invest the same intense effort to enable quick iteration cycles for their area as software engineers do. I cannot say whether this is a "culture problem" of engineering disciplines, or managers don't see a huge economic value that this would enable, and thus don't allow engineers to work on such topics.
I at least somewhat know what I am talking about, since when I had to get used to some CAD program, I really felt set back by decades in comparison what are standard practices in software development. A little bit like the difference between programming in a modern programming language and programming in Excel.
Thus, in some sense I am impressed by (e.g. mechanical) engineers who despite all this actually are capable to accomplish creating a product (and I do believe that if the practices improved, they could do so much more).
jvanveen
I can't believe people still buy the Purism scam after all these years...I ordered a Librem 5 and a Pinephone back in the days of the other supply chain story(Covid). The Pinephone flew in from China in less than 2 months; the Librem 5 took more than 4 years to arrive. All Purism offered during that time were "opportunities" to invest and exhausting delay stories about failing supply chains, while keeping their customers completely in the dark about their order state. Instead of preying on the goodwill of FOSS enthousiasts, they now try to tap into a new market (nationalism) to sell the same useless overpriced brick to.
bo1024
Purism laptops were great when I was a customer. Very sad they couldn't fix the issues you're talking about. I wanted to support the company further, and I think they are doing sincere, good, important work, especially on the software side. But these communication and customer relationship issues didn't get better and I switched away.
fsflover
> Very sad they couldn't fix the issues you're talking about.
Which issues? The phones were shipped, albeit with a long delay. Now, you can buy and get them quickly.
Sent from my Librem 5 daily driver.
bo1024
Communication and customer relations issues. My experience, and that of many others online, was that Purism was not transparent or apparently honest about things like timelines and delays. People also had problems with getting Purism to honor refunds, warranties (I had this issue), and similar, exacerbated by communication. This continued to happen over a period of years.
I'm not here to relitigate the whole Purism saga. I bought 4 Purism products, was one of the first people in the world to own a Librem 5, I invested (donated?). I love the company mission, I think it's fantastic that you're daily driving a Librem 5. But I'm not ready to engage again myself, and that's too bad, but I think a lot of people ended up feeling the same way.
bigyabai
The issue is pretty obvious to most normal people. My ex bought a Purism phone and laptop, said he would switch to Linux the moment they arrived at his doorstep. He ended up buying a new Macbook and iPhone before any of his Purism hardware started shipping. He might still be using the Apple hardware too.
I love FOSS as much as the next guy but you're being outright facetious if you can't see Purism's problem.
pengaru
While I'm not going to defend Purism the company, I just wanted to note I listen to MP3s on a daily basis using that useless overpriced brick I acquired used from ebay.
input_sh
There was an option to pay like $20 for literally nothing just to support the idea of an open source phone. I did so many years ago.
Worst $20 I ever spent. The amount of spam I've gotten as an "investor" is fucking ridiculous. The amount of times I've opened my email to see an "investment opportunity" from Todd Weaver (originating from multiple email addresses, no functional way to unsubscribe) is downright insulting.
From the bottom of my heart: fuck Todd Weaver, whose name is at the bottom of hundreds of spam emails I've received going back years.
fsflover
Did you try to unsubscribe? They mention such possibility in their every email.
input_sh
I'd be happy to provide dozens of examples in my inbox that prove otherwise, and that's just the ones that have escaped my spam folder over the years.
I can also provide you with examples of other people's less than flattering replies about the exact same issue that have somehow reached my inbox (I'm assuming due to a brief misconfiguration).
fsflover
> Instead of preying on the goodwill of FOSS enthousiasts, they now try to tap into a new market (nationalism)
Designing and selling the only existing phone made in USA, when everything is produced in China and has a risk of containing backdoors, is as far from nationalism as it gets. (And I'm not an American.) It's true innovation and an offer of a peace of mind for activists and journalists. Even though the USA turns into something bad, the phone runs an FSF-endorsed distro and provides schematics, so you can verify everything yourself (or rely on the community). You comment looks disingenuous to me.
csours
In the USA, 'Liberty' is now a strong nationalist dog whistle.
> and an offer of a peace of mind for activists and journalists
Sounds like a trap.
fsflover
They invented name "Liberty Phone" before Trump made this a thing. Perhaps they should rename it, I don't know. What I know is that this modern device is as free (as in freedom) as it gets today for modern devices.
cbmask
[dead]
maxglute
>We always were sort of maintaining two different bills of materials of Chinese componentry and Western componentry because they're different. Then we produced five different iterations of the Librem 5 phone through Chinese contract manufacturing. And we iterated through those five changes over the course of about 18 months. At that point, we finally had a production ready product. And then we were able to take everything that we did and bring it to US soil.
How many iterations can they get done in US in 18 months? That's what's going to kill Made in USA, if you can't get the design done on time, not a few $100 extra in PRC vs west sourced BOM, but millions more spent on development over longer time frame because lack of talent. Is the short/medium term solution still to send "homework" to Chinese prototype teams? I suppose economics of PRC speed and few prototypes > 100%+ tariffs.
throwup238
Engineers in the US would be able to get five iterations done using US fabs and assembly too, it’d just cost a ton more to get the same lead times and pay for the NRE.
Last time I worked on something of this complexity in 2019, 1 week turn around prototypes would cost $2-5k for the assembled PCBs from China but $30-50k in the US. It also took a bit more effort and inventory to make sure all the parts were stocked or shipped on time, which is a problem when you can’t visit Shenzhen’s malls if you’re missing a part. Once the first iteration was done, we were averaging between one and two months per revision. It’s very doable but nobody except medical, defense, and aerospace are willing to pay the price.
dmix
Kind of a pointless debate point (and economic plan) as it will always come down to humans and market conditions. Where the humans are who specialize and have deep experience in that stuff chose to work. You cant really fake that stuff via subsidization over long periods without also having all the other pieces of the market in place (all the way from low level workers to capital markets to regulatory environments and even attractive living costs)... otherwise Canada and EU would have grown a larger tech industry by now via their gov programs.
There has to be strong organic production and only then can gov help tip the scales upward, instead of generating it from thin air at the top level. If no one is fleeing China to do it in the US the same way people fled American market conditions to build stuff in Asia it won't happen.
Creating a forced siloed market through tariffs is probably the least efficient and most expensive method to achieving it. But it can plausibly if the domestic market gets used to not buying the nice things the rest of the world has for a decade (similar to what western gov is choosing to do with banning Chinese EVs but applied a thousandfold).
maxglute
More of a tongue in cheek comment. Gone are the days of "designed" in California "assembled" in China. There's a lot of Chinese designing to get the assembling part done now. If the only way you can goto market in reasonable timeframe is to have PRC iterate your design by rapidly leveraging their supply chains and human capita, then it's not really Made in USA Phone.
mrweasel
> Kind of a pointless debate point (and economic plan) as it will always come down to humans and market conditions.
Exactly, even the Fairphone is assembled in China.
HenryBemis
> ‘Let's take an existing made-in-China product and then just produce the same thing in the US.’
This is what got me. I remember 40-50 years ago everything (or most) "made in the USA". And how "Chinese product" was an insult while "American product" was a badge of honour. Oh how the turnstable..
When I was studying in the UK the _most_ diligent students were the Chinese ones. First to come, last to leave, spent hours and hours on workshops, but they were not interested in staying in the UK to live/work there. As if they were on a mission. Go-Learn-Return-SpreadKnowledge. Many other nationalities were tempted by the mighty-GBP and stayed. But not the Chinese. Vast majority of them learned as much as they could and then went back home. That was mid-90s.
And those 20yo students of the mid-90s are 50yo with great studies and 30 years of experience, and there were thousands of them studying all over the UK, USA, and other countries. So there you have it..
I keep thinking of "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio" [0]. The game is almost over, time for the next cycle..
DeathArrow
>We sell a Chinese made Librem 5 phone for $799. We sell the Liberty phone for $2,000. When you're looking at just those numbers alone, that looks like a giant leap in cost. But there's a couple of factors that are not publicly known when you're looking at just those prices. When you're looking at COGS, cost of goods sold, our Librem 5 phone is equivalent in cost to about an iPhone. It's about $500 and some odd dollars, $550. So we can see that the Librem 5 phone doesn't have a very high margin when we sell it. The Liberty phone, same COGS componentry wise, but to produce it on US soil, we're adding not quite a hundred dollars. So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone.
So the phone that costs them $550 is sold for about $800, while the phone that costs them $650 is sold for $2000. I wonder why is such a big difference in the margins.
altacc
These are interesting numbers and they're oddly buried towards the bottom of the article. A ~20% mark up for mostly sourcing and manufacturing in the US is less than I'd expected, especially given the 250% price difference. He does say something about why that is:
> It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.
So a mix of marketing and supply chain security. Businesses charge the price people will tolerate paying.
malvim
Something that caught my attention is how they started with Chinese design and engineering because that was where the knowledge was. They they learned and appropriated that knowledge to the point where this was not needed anymore.
I love this approach, as it’s not purely commercial, it’s focused on knowledge, and it’s not “stealing” tech, they probably have that on their contracts and the like.
Also, it’s EXACTLY what China set out to do a few decades ago, and foreign industrialists and capitalists were so eager to spend less, they flocked over there, and the Chinese now have the knowledge as well as the labor force do to what they do.
Some people love to cry about how China is “stealing” American tech, when in reality no one ever pointed a gun at a tech CEO’s head and said “you must move manufacturing to China.” They did it because it was profitable, and they knew the terms.
I’m not saying industrial espionage doesn’t happen in China, it does, as it does anywhere else. I just don’t like the rhetoric of saying they’re “bad” for doing a perfectly legal business tactic.
I'm surprised that they admitted that their cost to produce the phone in China is $550 and they sell it for $799, while the cost to produce the phone in the US is $650 and they sell it for $2000. That's a 45% markup on one and 207% markup on the other.
Taking just those figures in mind, they shouldn't be at all worried about tariffs - anything more than an 18% tariff, it's cheaper for them to build in the US than China for US customers. Honestly, that's much lower than I expected, especially considering they're even more restrictive in their component sourcing than most companies would need to be because they're catering to a security-focused group.
I guess the real issue is that they don't have any more production capacity in the US, rather than it just being a cost issue.