It’s going to take Apple more than 4 years to bring manufacturing back to America

Apple is under direct pressure from President Donald Trump, who is back in the White House and demanding that the tech giant shift its iPhone production into the United States — or face tariffs of 25% or higher.

Trump made the threat in a public post, saying the company would be punished if it keeps building its devices outside the country. Right now, most iPhones are built in China, though Apple has been slowly expanding production into India.

The challenge is that this isn’t a light switch you flip. It’s a massive operation, and building something like that in the US isn’t going to happen quickly. Barton Crockett, a senior analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, said Friday on CNBC’s Squawk Box that it’s basically impossible under the current timeline.

“This tariff asking them to do something that is pretty well nigh impossible to do, to make iPhones at scale in this country, is not going to happen in an investable time frame, and certainly not while Trump is president,” Barton said. He added that Apple is “working really hard” to figure out what kind of response they can offer that won’t destroy their business model.

Apple may try symbolic moves, not real shifts

Timmy Cook’s company has been a constant target as Trump ramps up his push to bring factory jobs back to the US Even though Trump gave a temporary tariff waiver in April for iPhones and computers — including those made in China — Apple has no clear sense of what will happen after June.

Barton believes they can’t stay silent for much longer. He speculated Apple might move a small part of production to America just to calm things down, maybe a limited site that builds a few thousand iPhones, with some robotics R&D on the side.

“If they can put a facility somewhere that makes a few thousand iPhones, and put some R&D into robotics so that you can spin a story that at some point in the future… ‘maybe we can make iPhones,’” Barton said, “That’s not going to happen while Trump is president, but they can put something in the ground that creates a future path that they can talk to.”

But even that would barely scratch the surface. Analysts have pointed out that made-in-America iPhones wouldn’t just be harder to build — they’d be way more expensive. A single unit could cost anywhere from $1,500 to $3,500 at retail, thanks to higher US labor costs and the lack of a local parts ecosystem.

India becomes more critical as US demand grows

Apple started making iPhones in India back in 2017, but the factories there only became capable of producing the latest models recently. That’s why India is growing fast in Apple’s playbook. The country has a better trade relationship with the US, and companies like Foxconn — Apple’s main assembler — are investing heavily.

According to the Financial Times, Foxconn is now constructing a $1.5 billion factory in India that will handle iPhone production, expanding Apple’s ability to keep building outside China without immediately triggering Trump’s tariff threats.

Still, Aaron Rakers, an analyst at Wells Fargo, isn’t convinced the 25% tariff will even happen. “We’re skeptical,” Aaron wrote, but he added that if it does, Apple might raise the cost of iPhones in the US by $100 to $300 to keep its profit margins near 41%.

There’s another twist. If Trump decides to slap tariffs on iPhones made in India too, that could wipe out Apple’s entire fallback strategy. Aaron warned that imports from India could be specifically targeted if the administration feels Apple is dodging the rules. And since the relationship between the company and the administration is clearly strained, that’s not out of the question.

Dan Ives, a Wedbush analyst, doesn’t believe this fantasy ends well for American manufacturing. “We believe the concept of Apple producing iPhones in the US is a fairy tale that is not feasible,” he said in a note.

And it’s not just about feasibility; it’s about time too. Timmy and his team would need more than four years just to lay the groundwork for a serious manufacturing footprint in America. By then, a whole new administration could be in charge.

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