A new line of smartphones, produced by the Trump Organization for “real Americans,” may have already hit a snag – it is almost impossible for them to be made in the U.S.
The MAGAphones are a self-branded smartphone and mobile service, though experts have pointed out that to reach the advertised price point of $499, some (if not the majority) of the component parts will likely have to be manufactured abroad – at least initially.
The president’s eldest sons – Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump – said on Monday that the gold colored “T1 Phone will be available in August, while the phone plan will cost $47.45 a month. The new mobile venture will include call centers based in the United States and phones made in America, the organization said.
It comes after the president has piled pressure on tech giant Apple to move its manufacturing base to the U.S. at the risk of feeling the wrath of his sweeping tariffs, introduced on so-called Liberation Day.
A spokesman for the Trump Organization told The Wall Street Journal that “manufacturing for the new T1 phone will be in Alabama, California and Florida,” though some have suggested that the device at that price point will likely come from China, at least initially.
A breakdown of some of the specifications shows the new device appear to outdo Apple’s latest offering – the iPhone 16 Pro Max.
The MAGAphone will have a 6.8-inch AMOLED screen, which is typically made by South Korean firms Samsung and LG. For comparison, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is 6.9 inches and costs $1,199.
The T1 phone claims to feature a 50-megapixel camera, compared to the Pro Max’s 48-megapixels, along with two others at the back of the device and a 16-megapixel front-facing camera on the front. Apple’s camera’s are mainly sourced from Sony in Japan.
The type of processor used to power the T1 is not mentioned in the specs, however, to be cheap enough to retail at $499 it is likely that the chips will need to be made in China or Taiwan, experts have said. Manufacturing firms MediaTek and Qualcomm both operate in the latter.
CNBC notes that the memory is one area that could use American tech, with companies including Micron making such components stateside. But Samsung could be another option.
“Even when there is local manufacturing available the company will have to rely on components that are being imported from outside the US,” Jeff Fieldhack, research director at Counterpoint Research, told the outlet.
Others have gone further, with Francisco Jeronimo, vice president at International Data Corporation, describing the suggestion of T1 manufacturing in the U.S. as “completely impossible.”
“There is no way the phone was designed from scratch and there is no way it is going to be assembled in the U.S. or completely manufactured in the U.S.,” he told CNBC.
Tinglong Dai, a professor of operations management and business analytics at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School, told WSJ that it would take “at least five years” to fully manufacture smartphones like the T1 in the U.S.
“There’s absolutely no way you could make the screen, get that memory, camera, battery, everything” in the U.S., he said.
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