Do we have the aluminum milling capacity at scale?

Can we manufacture touch screens at scale?

Can we manufacture Li-ion batteries at scale? (Tesla and Panasonic might be able to, with large new investments, but I don't think there's anybody ready to go)

Do we have 3nm fab capacity? (TSMC is planning to build one, but AFAIK not yet)

Do we have the ability to manufacture various sensors at scale? (Some likely yes - ambient light, inertial - some no)

What about image sensors? (Maybe, Omnivision is probably the best candidate, but I don't think they can currently do 48MP. ON Semiconductor is also a good chunk away from that, AFAIK)

I think that's a sufficient number of parts to claim we currently can't make cell phones, as long as you define cell phone as "current gen cell phone". We could probably retool relatively quickly back to at least cell phones, but even that is AFAIK not a current capacity.

Can we _theoretically_ do all that? Sure. But we can't right now, or within short time frames, and we can't without significant investment.

That aluminum milling scaling problem itself is like, an entire category of hard.

CNC machines are hard to scale anything more than linearly. We need to train up hundreds of thousands to become CNC machinists. An entire support industry for machine maintenance, tooling manufacturing (an even harder problem), consumable commodities needs to be similarly scaled in parallel.

> We need to train up hundreds of thousands to become CNC machinists

What? Are you suggesting that aluminium phone cases nowadays are created by an army of trained CNC machinists? And not programmed once by a (few) dozen engineers per model of the handful of existing phone models and then executed by highly automated factories and an army of "low-skilled" workers.

Completely automated machining cells have been a thing for a long time.

True, but hiring CNC programmers is a significant limiting factor in growing such businesses.

That army of “low-skilled” workers are highly skilled machine operators.

CNC programming isn’t generally performed by engineers—it is currently mostly performed by veteran machine operators.

To get enough veteran machine operators who have the skill and talent to program at the level necessary for high-precision consumer goods, you need quite the workforce pool.

And then add in all the other CNC machinists and manufacturing engineers you need for the auxiliary industries (tooling, molding, the machines themselves) and it starts to add up.

Don’t forget every other industry that is competing for this labor pool.

Modems :D

The chips. Which are... kind of the most important part, arguably. Hopefully Intel's new fabs will help.