Welcome to The Tech Minute. Today, we’re diving into Scott Galloway and Patrick McGee’s breakdown of what it would take to build an iPhone in the U.S. First, the big kicker: labor. “You’d be looking at five times higher wage costs,” Galloway warns, meaning an extra $600 per device once you factor in automation and overhead. Then there’s the ecosystem—Foxconn’s Shenzhen campus isn’t just a factory, it’s a network of suppliers, engineers, and logistics all optimized for scale. “You can’t flip a switch and recreate that in Tennessee,” McGee adds. Throw in the cost of onshoring chip fabs—hundreds of billions in investment—and you quickly realize this isn’t a political soundbite, it’s a trillion-dollar proposition. In short, unless consumers are ready to pay hundreds more per iPhone, China stays king of assembly. That’s it for The Tech Minute.
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