When President Barack Obama asked the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs about making an iPhone in the U.S., Jobs didn’t mince words. 

“Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs said at a dinner with Obama in 2011.

The president of the U.S. and the CEO of Apple have changed, but the ambition of a “Made in the USA” iPhone remains. 

Defending its “reciprocal tariffs,” the White House this week said President Donald Trump believes the U.S. has the workforce and the resources to build iPhones in the U.S. Apple CEO Tim Cook nor anybody else at the tech company has come out to back that claim, but analysts who follow Apple say the idea of an American-made iPhone is impossible at worst and highly expensive at best. 

As it’s largely a theoretical exercise, there’s a broad range of guesses as to how much an all-American iPhone might cost.

Bank of America Securities analyst Wamsi Mohan said in a Thursday note that the iPhone 16 Pro, which is currently priced at $1,199, could increase 25% based on labor costs alone. That would make it a roughly $1,500 device.

Wedbush’s Dan Ives pegged $3,500 as the U.S. iPhone’s price shortly after last week’s tariff announcement, estimating that Apple would need to spend $30 billion over three years to move 10% of its supply chain to the U.S.

At the moment, Apple makes more than 80% of its products in China. Those products now receive a 145% tax when they’re imported into the U.S. after Trump’s tariffs went into effect this week.

Experts say that a “Made in the USA” iPhone would face serious challenges, ranging from finding and paying a U.S. workforce to tariff costs that Apple would incur importing parts to the U.S. for final assembly.

There’s broad agreement among analysts and industry watchers that it’s not likely to happen. Wall Street has doubted for years that Apple would do an American iPhone. “I don’t think that’s a thing,” Needham’s Laura Martin quipped on CNBC this week.

“It’s just not a reality that on the time frame of imposing tariffs that this is going to shift manufacturing here. It’s pie in the sky,” said Jeff Fieldhack, research director at Counterpoint Research.

Apple designs its products in California, but they are made by contract manufacturers, such as Foxconn, the company’s top supplier. 

Even if Apple spent heavily to get Foxconn or another partner to agree to build some iPhones in the U.S, it would take years to construct the plants and install the machinery, and there’s no guarantee that U.S. trade policy might not change yet again in a way to make the factory less useful.

The biggest issue with Uncle Sam’s iPhone is that the U.S. doesn’t have the same workforce as China – though the massive number of workers needed to build iPhones is one of the attractions for the Trump administration.

“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on CBS on Sunday.

Foxconn builds iPhones and other Apple products in massive campuses that include dorms and shuttles. Workers often travel from nearby regions to work at the plant for short periods, and employment surges seasonally in the summer before new iPhones come out in the fall. The well-oiled system helps Apple pump out more than 200 million iPhones per year. 

Additionally, Foxconn over the years has come under scrutiny for worker conditions many times, including in 2011 when the company installed nets around some of its buildings after a rash of worker suicides. Oversight groups have said that Foxconn’s work is grueling and that workers are pressured into working overtime.

Despite working conditions, Foxconn hired 50,000 additional workers at its biggest factory in Henan to build enough iPhones ahead of the latest models’ September launch, Chinese media reported last fall.

But Chinese workers get paid far less than American workers. The hourly wage during the iPhone 16 surge was 26 yuan, or $3.63, with a signing bonus of 7,500 yuan, or about $1,000, according to the South China Morning Post. For comparison, the minimum wage in California is $16.50 per hour. 

Bank of America Securities’ Mohan estimated on Thursday that the labor cost for assembling and testing an iPhone in the U.S. would come in at $200 per iPhone, up from $40 in China.

Apple CEO Cook has also said that another issue is that American workers don’t have the right skills. In a 2017 interview, Cook said there aren’t enough tooling engineers in the U.S. Those engineers work on and configure the machines that take the sophisticated designs from Apple, which come in the form of computer files, and transform them into physical objects.

“The reason is because of the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is,” Cook said when asked at a conference why Apple does so much production in China.

A meeting of tooling engineers in China could fill “multiple football fields,” but in the U.S., it would be hard to fill one, Cook said. 

The most recent effort to have Foxconn move significant production to the U.S. was a failure.

Trump announced a $10 billion investment from Foxconn to build plants in Wisconsin in 2017. Apple was never officially attached to Foxconn’s Wisconsin location, but that didn’t stop Trump from claiming Apple would build three “big beautiful plants” in the U.S.

Foxconn changed plans several times for what the Wisconsin plant would produce, but it eventually settled on making face masks during the pandemic – nothing electronics related. The Foxconn Wisconsin plant was pitched as delivering 13,000 jobs, but it only created 1,454 jobs. 

During the pandemic, plans for the plant were abandoned, and most of the facility remains unbuilt. 

Apple worked with Foxconn in 2011 to expand iPhone production to Brazil to avoid large import duties in that country. The plant is still operational today, and will produce iPhone 16 models to help Apple get around U.S. tariffs, according to recent Brazilian media reports.

But even after the $12 billion factory was operational, most components were still imported from Asia, and in 2015, four years after the plant was announced, the iPhones made in Brazil retailed for twice the price of iPhones made in China, according to Reuters.

However, recent efforts by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Apple’s main chip manufacturer, have been successful. TSMC now makes small quantities of cutting-edge chips at a new factory in Arizona, and Apple’s a committed customer.

Even if iPhones could be assembled in America, much of what goes into an iPhone comes from countries around the world, all of which have received tariffs.

The vast majority of parts in an iPhone are made in Asia. The processor is manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan, the display is produced by South Korean companies like LG or Samsung, and the majority of the other components are made in China.

Apple would face tariffs on most of those parts, according to Mohan of Bank of America Securities, unless it could secure waivers for individual parts. Semiconductors, which are among the most valuable parts inside an iPhone, are exempt from tariffs at the moment.  

Trump on Wednesday put a 90-day pause on most of his tariffs, but if the pause comes to an end, a Yankee-made iPhone 16 Pro Max could increase in price by 91% thanks to tariffs and increased labor costs, Mohan wrote.

“While it may be possible to move final assembly to the U.S., moving the entire iPhone supply chain would be a much bigger undertaking and would likely take many years, if even possible,” Mohan wrote.

Though Jobs shut down the idea of an America iPhone flat out with Obama, Cook hasn’t taken the same unvarnished approach. 

Instead, Cook has led Apple’s strategy to engage with Trump, including attending his inauguration in January. Apple also announced that it will spend $500 billion within the U.S., including on some AI server production in Houston. Trump regularly cites the investment with approval.

During the first Trump administration, Cook’s strategy worked. 

Although Trump talked about stars-and-stripes iPhones and Apple building plants in the U.S., the tech company was able to secure temporary exemptions for many of its products made in China. That meant Apple didn’t have to pay tariffs on important devices like the iPhone.

The charm offensive during Trump’s first term culminated in the fall of 2019 when Apple extended its commitment to assembling the $3,000 Mac Pro in a Flex factory outside Austin, Texas. Trump toured the factory with Cook. 

Before Apple commits to a red, white and blue iPhone, it may produce some lower-volume products or accessories in the U.S. to charm Trump, Wall Street analysts say. 

“Given we now know that the Trump administration is willing to negotiate, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple commit to some small-volume production in the US (HomePod? AirTags?), similar to its September 2019 commitment to manufacture the new Mac Pro in Austin, TX, to try and win an exemption,” Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote in a Thursday note. 

Apple declined to comment.

Already under pressure amid last week’s multitrillion-dollar stock market rout, the venture capital industry now faces an even tougher outlook amid ongoing uncertainty stemming from U.S. tariffs.

A dearth of initial public offerings or mergers and acquisitions — coupled with the trend that startups are now staying private for longer — has put immense strain on VC funds. Venture capitalists can typically only realize gains on their investments when a company goes public or is sold, allowing them to cash out.

Mere days after U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to impose so-called reciprocal tariffs on a swathe of countries, it emerged that two major tech unicorns — fintech firm Klarna and ticketing platform StubHub — were delaying plans to go public due to a sharp plunge in global equity markets. Notably, both companies had filed initial public offering prospectuses in recent weeks.

“No one can go out with this turbulence,” Tobias Bengtsdahl, a partner at VC firm Antler’s Nordics fund, told CNBC on a call last week. “When the market plunges like it has now … you have to do the same prediction on the private markets.”

Limited partners invest in a venture fund in the hope that they’ll generate sizable returns over its lifetime, which can span as long as 10 years. Early-stage funds invest in the hope that a few startups in their portfolio will generate the kind of returns outcomes like Uber and Spotify reaped for their private backers.

Further down the line, investors are holding out hope for big tech IPOs to return later into Trump’s presidency. VCs had counted on the Trump administration resulting in a reinvigorated IPO market.

“A lot of people feel Trump has promised them open up the IPO market and open up the M&A market,” Antler’s Bengtsdahl said.

“It’s now 6 months into his term,” he added, noting the market can tolerate the new administration’s failure to meet this pledge in its early days. “But people are demanding that it happens within his term.”

Meta will face off against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Monday in a high-stakes antitrust trial that could result in the company divesting Instagram and WhatsApp.

The trial in Washington is expected to last weeks and centers around the FTC’s allegations that Meta monopolizes the personal social networking market. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and other current and former Meta executives are expected to testify, along with top brass from rivals TikTok, Snap and Google’s YouTube, according to a legal filing.

The FTC claims Meta shouldn’t have been allowed to buy Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, and the agency is calling for those units to be sliced off from the Menlo Park, California, company.

“Acquiring these competitive threats has enabled Facebook to sustain its dominance—to the detriment of competition and users—not by competing on the merits, but by avoiding competition,” the FTC said in a legal filing.

Meta disagrees and filed a pretrial brief last week reiterating its arguments that it is not a monopoly and that acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp has not harmed competition. 

The trial will test the boundaries of the U.S.’s antitrust laws pertaining to corporate acquisitions, said Prasad Krishnamurthy, a law professor at U.C. Berkeley Law. The FTC will have to prove that not only did Meta monopolize the social media market but that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp actively “harmed competition.”  

“It’s a big case because it involves Meta, a social media giant, and it involves one of the most important kind of markets in the world, the social media market,” Krishnamurthy said. “It has big implications for something that consumers use as part of their daily life, Instagram and WhatsApp.”

The FTC filed its antitrust case against Meta in 2020, but judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington dismissed the case in 2021, saying the agency did not have enough evidence to prove “Facebook holds market power.” 

Despite the dismissal, the FTC in August 2021 filed an amended complaint with more details about the company’s user numbers and metrics relative to competitors like Snapchat, the now-defunct Google+ social network and Myspace. After reviewing the amendments, Boasberg in 2022 ruled that the case could proceed, saying the FTC had presented more details than before. 

“Although the agency may well face a tall task down the road in proving its allegations, the Court believes that it has now cleared the pleading bar and may proceed to discovery,” Boasberg wrote.

Meta motioned to end the case last April, but Boasberg denied it, ruling in November that the company must face trial. In a small victory for Meta, however, Boasberg did dismiss the FTC’s allegation that Facebook restricted third-party app developers’ access to its platform to maintain market dominance.

The company is expected to push back on the rest of the FTC’s allegations at trial on Monday. In a recent pre-trial brief, Meta’s lawyers wrote that the FTC fails to acknowledge that the company competes with numerous rivals, including TikTok, YouTube and Apple’s iMessage.

But the FTC’s core argument is that the company has monopolized the specific market of personal social networking, saying there are no major alternatives to Meta’s apps like Facebook and Instagram, which are used by people to stay up to date and communicate with friends and family in an online, shared-social space.

This disputed notion of the market that Meta operates and competes in could be crucial to the case’s outcome, Krishnamurthy said.

“When you look at antitrust cases, the market definition that comes out of the case, even what ends up being the one that determines the ruling, is often not anything remotely like how lay people or even businesses in that market will describe it,” Krishnamurthy said.

With the tech industry in particular, Khan brought an antitrust case against Amazon in 2023 and unsuccessfully sued to block Meta, Nvidia and Microsoft’s acquisitions of virtual reality startup Within, chip-design giant Arm and Activision Blizzard, respectively.

Though this case kicked off during Trump’s first time in office, Khan continued to pursue it during the Biden administration, telling a House Committee in May 2024 that the lawsuit “highlights the competitive importance of data and notes that privacy degradation can constitute an antitrust harm.”

Some legal experts have said that Trump’s pick of Ferguson could mean the FTC eases up on antitrust enforcement.

Zuckerberg has courted favor with the Trump administration as part of a broader policy change within Meta. The social media baron has reportedly met with the president at least three times since January, he attended Trump’s inauguration and he co-hosted a ball for the president in Washington.

Khan told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in early Jan. that she hopes the new Trump Administration won’t give Meta a “sweetheart deal” in the FTC case after Zuckerberg’s overtures to the White House.

Ferguson, however, has not indicated that the FTC plans to abandon its case, and in March, he told CNBC that his team has a “trial coming up” and that they are “pressing toward that.”

“My job is to make sure that everyone is complying with the antitrust laws,” Ferguson said. “And if they aren’t, we go to court.”

Ferguson is painting himself as an independent and is proceeding with trial outside of the broader political world, said George Hay, an antitrust law professor at Cornell Law School. Hay added that he’s pleased that Ferguson appears to be moving forward with the case despite much of its progress occurring during the Biden Administration.

“When you come in to the FTC, you inherit a staff of professionals who’ve been doing a lot of work, and it’s not that easy just to say, ‘Throw it all away,'” Hay said.

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