What Would It Take to Make an All-American iPhone?
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Hey, TNB listeners, before we get started, a heads up. We're going to be asking you a question at the top of each show for the next few weeks. Our goal here at Tech News Briefing is to keep you updated with the latest headlines and trends on all things tech. Now we want to know more about you, what you like about the show, and what more you'd like to be hearing from us.

So our question this week is how important are the latest tech headlines to you? If you're listening on Spotify, look for our poll under the episode description, or you can send us an email to tnb at wsj.com. Now on to the show.

Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, April 10th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. A show today about our reliance on technology, how leaning too into the latest trends might make our brains lazy. And then we find out whether Apple can really adopt an America First strategy.

We start with a brief reprieve from the impact of tariffs on America's tech industry and focus instead on outsourcing your brain. Every time a new technology is introduced, TVs, the internet, smartphones, there are always the naysayers who fear it'll rot our brains or make us lazy. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, shifting a difficult task off your to-do list can be a good thing until it gets to a point where it becomes unthinkable.

A bad thing. Wall Street Journal reporter Sam Schechner recently discovered what that point was for him when he realized just how often he was relying on AI to compose complicated messages in French. So Sam, tell me about how you recently recognized that you might be leaning on AI a bit too much. I'm a journal reporter based in Paris. You may be able to tell from my voice that I'm American, though. And I've come to speak French pretty well.

But what happened is that I realized ChatGPT was really good at writing nuanced emails and things in French. And I started when my son's basketball coach was habitually late. This was actually last year. And he was also not very nice. And so I needed to complain to the local rec center in French. And it's something I could do. But, you know, at the end of the day, you're tired. You've finished a long day of work. So I asked ChatGPT to do it for me.

And the response was pretty good. I just changed a few words and sent it off. And after that, I was hooked. And it's something that we often like to joke about, like, oh, you know, this is something that makes my life easier. Isn't that funny? But when it comes to it, lots of instances of children in school relying on AI to do their homework for them, to help them with take-home tests or write essays for them. So leveraging AI is actually interesting.

more detrimental maybe than some of us think, and it's especially true for children, right? It's a really interesting thing because I have kids as well, and I want them to be prepared for the new tech-driven world. And we also want them to learn how to use tools. But in the same way that you don't give a five-year-old a calculator, you know, before they've learned their multiplication tables.

It is potentially dangerous to give a kid a tool that will solve a more complex cognitive problem for them. You know, a lot of the discussion around education has been about how AI can help personalized tutoring. And there's evidence that shows that the personalization element of it and the fact that people like using it can actually help kids.

But then people talk about plagiarism, and that is a moral issue. But there's also the issue that's behind plagiarism, which is why do we care if they wrote that essay or if they're stealing it? Nobody's really going to read that essay that, sorry, that your 15-year-old wrote many years from now. That's not the purpose of the essay. The purpose is to learn how to write an essay. And so if they're not actually doing that work, then they're not going to learn.

And you spoke to cognitive scientists about this. So how do we blunt the downside impacts of AI? What I learned is that you really just have to do hard mental work. Writing is hard and you want to outsource it. And it's precisely because it's hard that it's a good workout for your brain. You don't get ripped by lifting one pound weights. You need to do something difficult. And so the key is just to not

outsource your thinking to the machine. Maybe if it's grunt work, you could use it. But even then, there's studies that show that people get over-reliant, and the grunt work itself also is a kind of mental training. And you've stopped relying on AI? I have not stopped relying on AI. I live in the modern world. I write about technology. I have many long documents that need comparisons and things like that. But what I do is I try to use it mindfully, which is to say, I will make myself read that long document

I will use the AI to compare it, and then I will plow through it, too. That was WSJ tech reporter Sam Schechner. Coming up, could President Trump's trade war actually make an America-made iPhone possible? We'll ask our tech columnist after the break.

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Since President Trump unveiled his tariff strategy, American firms with deep global supply chains have been scrambling to find ways to lessen the impact and the costs that consumers fear will be passed on to them. One example is Apple. It relies heavily on countries across Asia to make many components that go into its iPhone. The company has already said that it'll shift at least some device production away from China to India, where tariffs are lower in the short term.

Longer term, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS Face the Nation more production will be done in America. The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America. But in reality, that process is complicated and could take years, as WSJ senior tech columnist Joanna Stern found out. So, Joanna, can an American-made iPhone actually be done?

Well, it turns out anything can be done with a little bit of money, resources, time, and maybe some magic. What my reporting is showing is that it's not impossible. Well, some parts are not impossible. Other parts may be impossible, but it would just take a lot of time and money. Manufacturing of components and then the assembly of phones, those are two of the big areas.

One of them can potentially be done in America. The other one is much harder, at least in the near term. The thing I heard from pretty much every expert is that bringing everything, and that would include the supply chain, all of the parts that are in the iPhone, bringing all of the components and all the manufacturing of all of this stuff, and also bringing the assembly to America is basically impossible. They do not see that ever happening.

This is a global phone, parts from all over the world. We found some research that said parts are from over 40 countries. Most of those parts are being assembled and being created into components in about six or so countries, and those are mostly in Asia. So if we wanted to shift that all here, no one would say that could ever really happen.

40 countries, as you say, involved in the production of an iPhone, which I think is just a really incredible thing to think about alone. But then you think about all of the people who are working in all of those different countries, the skills and the expertise that's involved in that. And it's on a whole different scale.

And that's another problem for America, too. Just talk us through these villages, essentially, that have been built in some of these other countries just to make components for the iPhone. Yeah. One of the really interesting things that I heard time and time again, and even Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, has said this, is that it's not only that there's cheap labor in countries like China. It is the expertise and the skill of the workers there and the engineers there.

tooling is a big thing we heard about. The way that they customize and make these very, very small parts or their components, right? They've got lots of parts into one little piece. Think about camera modules or how they piece together the back enclosure or the memory and all the different parts of the phone. That is all really different types of skills, different types of automation as well. But that kind of expertise does not

exist right now in America. And if it does, as Tim Cook has famously said, that expertise could maybe be in one room. Listen to what Tim Cook said back in 2017. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.

What about automation? Can that play a larger role in helping bring manufacturing to America? Everything I've heard over the last week is that easier said than done. Yes, of course, machines and automation are a huge part of the factories in China and through the fabs that are creating chips and semiconductors. And we, in fact, have some of that here in the U.S.

But getting it to a scale like they have in China, where I've heard multiple times 20,000 phones or more can be made at a time. We don't have that here. We just don't have that infrastructure here. So you've got to think about, yes, the skill of the people. You've got to think about the machinery and the locations and the factories here.

And the best I could really hear from experts was like three to five years, three to five years to even set up a semblance of that for the iPhone. Now, I do want to say that it's not impossible for Apple to bring back some manufacturing to America. They already do build the Mac Pro desktop in the U.S. But one of the reasons they do the Mac Pro in the U.S. is one, it's a little bit of a simpler product to make. And I don't want to say simpler because it's not a simple product to make, but it's also a lower volume product. Right.

And so they're not making as many of these. And so it's not impossible for Apple to say, we're going to bring some manufacturing back to the U.S. and we're going to do it with this product. But the iPhone is just the big one that not a lot of people can agree on would be easy to do. And if it was done, it would take a long time. Is a made in America iPhone a goal for Apple? And if the tariff war makes it one, how long would it realistically take to build out these more local supply chains?

Apple's not commenting on this. I was reading through a little bit of Steve Jobs biography and that Steve Jobs wanted to make the iPhone in America, but he just ran into the same problems we're hearing about today. As we deal with this trade war with China and the tariffs keep going up, we don't know if Apple will get an exemption like they had in the first administration. We really just don't know, but that's more likely to happen way before an iPhone made in America.

In the end, a lot of this all comes down to cost. And it's a big cost for Apple and it's a big cost for consumers. Yes. And the Trump administration is holding up the fact that Apple has committed to spending $500 billion on U.S. manufacturing.

And so, like I said, Apple is not opposed to making things in the US. It wants to. It's just, what is it going to make in the US? And just to be clear on that $500 billion that Apple's already said they're going to put towards US manufacturing, that's for AI servers. That's not for iPhones. The company said that in their press release.

That was WSJ Senior Tech Columnist Joanna Stern. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang and supervising producer Emily Martosi. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.