By Sandy Wells
KABC News
Apple is looking at making iPhones inside the U.S. again.
Jeremy Kaplan, Editor-in-Chief at Digital Trends says Apple requested two of their biggest Chinese manufacturers, Foxconn and Pegatron, to investigate the feasibility of doing the work they do in China here in the U.S.
“One of those companies came back to them and said, ‘Absolutely not, it isn’t going to happen.’ And the other one said, alright, we’re going to look into this for you.”
Assembly work isn’t too sexy, though.
“It’s take a chip from over here, put it over here, take a chip from over here and put it over there. Repeat 60 times every half hour and do it for the next nine hours. It’s a challenging task. And the way some of those plants are set up, you have dormitories that are directly next to the plant so you live and work at the facility and you don’t leave it. It’s not the best lifestyle. On top of that, you have very limited pay, there’s not a lot of rewards for the job. In theory, we’d do it differently here in the U.S.”
One of the issues of bringing the work here is cost, though Kaplan says the cost of labor is not a really large part of the cost of an iPhone.
“It’s fascinating to think about,” says Kaplan.
He says if the Trump administration can coax Apple to move the $200 billion or so it has currently parked in Ireland, then the company would have the capital to invest the tens of billions of dollars needed to bring the work back to the U.S.
Kaplan was a guest on 790 KABC’s McIntyre in the Morning Show with Doug McIntyre and Terri-Rae Elmer.
