Happy to pay that price if I can have some guarantees slaves and children did not assemble them. A new, maxed out, unlocked iPhone approaches $1500 pretty quickly. And I would be willing to guess some indentured “workers” put them together.

That iPhone will also run circles around this phone in every performance metric.

Sure but are you really pushing the performance of your phone? More power to you if so. I do game programming and rarely need to utilize super new features (unless AR related, but even then I could get by with a few gens back). For me personally peace of mind and not supporting slavery in worth the downgrade.

Making stuff in the US ain’t cheap

Google for a brief time assembled Moto in Texas. It wasn't outrageously priced.

Google has the money to take a loss if it means getting product out the door faster than Apple.

google doesn't take losses on smart phones. only home devices

proof: see profit margins on all pixels/nexus. they either use cheap components in flagship models, or partner with someone a la apple and break then to build phones at their loss (see: htc, moto)

It's meant to run GNU Linux instead of Android, so maybe the 4GB RAM might be ok?

Definitely not enough if this was running Android. RAM usage on my Android right now: - 2.1 GB Android OS - 1.0 GB Google - 0.5 GB Android System - 0.5 GB Firefox - 0.4 GB Android System Intelligence - 0.4 GB System UI - 0.4 GB Google Play services ... and a bunch more < 0.1 GB services that seem necessary

Android really shat on, set fire to and salted one of my favourite things about Linux in this regard. I.e, how few resources I can give it and still be productive. Hell, I'm gonna assert right now that if Android didn't waste such gobs of memory, I could still be doing the... oh, about 4 or 5 things a phone is actually useful for, on hardware equivalent to the SGS1.

I know, because I did all those things on the SGS1 and it worked fine.

Seriously, what the fuck happened?

That's the difference between GNU/Linux and Android.

Android uses Java because there's an existing market of Java developers. Java does not have much inherent overhead but like any tool with a lower barrier to entry a lot of lower quality software hits the market. Optimizing for time to market by each company's app team is where the wheels come off the bus. People expect software to be free or $0.99. Companies are pushing the technical limits on how much data can be mined bloating their apps. Android is fragmented across diverse hardware, operating system versions, and cellular carrier permutations making testing and QA a much harder problem.

Everyone wants to pay for US labor until the final price tag appears.

This is the actual amount stuff costs when not using babies to assemble.

I’m cool with it

I'm sure economies of scale would bring down the price somewhat if the majority of the industry's manufacturing was done in developed countries.

You're convinced that assembly in the US doesn't involve babies?

I couldn’t possibly begin to disprove or prove that.

What I can say is we have decently strong childhood labor laws which other developing countries do not, and that fact is exploited to drive down costs and increase profits.