I don’t think you understood. The quality of the tooling doesn’t mean the tooling was built there. It’s also not true that China is the exclusive place where such quality or tooling or critical mass of infrastructure exists. You see similar things in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and - in the United States. But the customer of the US manufacturing isn’t you personally, a crucial fact when talking about Apple and where they manufacture things for - you personally. The customer is advanced manufacturers - who export tooling and infrastructure to China.

That doesn’t mean China is unable to do this themselves, but it’s just not their focus. I’m sure the decoupling we are doing and export controls will change that faster than would otherwise happen.

The specific market though the US is unable to easily rebuild and bootstrap is end to end semiconductor manufacturing. Our supply chain is almost entirely tied to East Asian manufacturing which is a geopolitical and economic problem for us. Part of decoupling is trying to break that by creating a bipolar manufacturing structure for semiconductors, and increasingly battery and solar.

He's lying. The people who build his phones in China do so for less than $3 per hour. That sounds pretty low labor cost to me.

Sure, one could probably find even lower labor costs elsewhere, and the infra in place is definitely a benefit, but let's not pretend we couldn't just as easily do it in the US if it weren't for those pesky labor costs.

There are many places where labour is cheaper than china.

But then you visit one of the electronics markets in shenzen, and see why everything is still there. Just look at eg. "strange parts" videos on youtube. Need 64 gig memory chips for iphones? Just visit a physical store and buy a few. Need more? Just ask the guy there, and he'll find someone to sell them to you. Walmart ordered christmas ornaments from your plastic company? Need blinking led modules? There are 5 companies nearby that will sell them to you, and you can get them in days, not months. Something like this doesn't exist anywhere else.

I find that quote maddening. The lack of self awareness of the irony in Tim Cook’s statement is astounding and I say this as a huge fan of Apple’s products. I think it’s very disingenuous for him to claim that America lacks tooling engineers when the very reason for this is that companies just like Apple started outsourcing all manufacturing and engineering work to China a few decades ago, in pursuit of lower costs (ignoring the very obvious reasons it cost so much less, while out of the other side of their mouths, loudly patting themselves on the back for supposedly standing for human/environmental rights). This, in effect, for all intents and purposes played a huge role in crippling American manufacturing. Of course it technically still exists, but only a fraction of what it was as recently as the 1990s.

Fast forward to today, per Cook’s own words, China “stopped being the low-labor-cost-country” it once was, so in effect we’re not only back to paying higher prices, now we also no longer have the capabilities to manufacture and engineer that we once had, so it’s a massive net loss for the entire country, and yet Tim Cook is essentially calling people out of touch for suggesting the US could handle the job - when companies like his own are the very reason it no longer easily can today.

Friendly suggestion for Apple and other American corporations: please consider using some of those tens of billions in cash on hand each of your companies have, and invest in helping fix the problem you contributed to: help bring manufacturing and tooling engineering back to your home country. You can solve some of the most difficult engineering problems in the world, you can design a chip that squeezes billions of transistors into a tiny fingernail sized chip, and you can make pocket sized phones that have changed the world. You can do this too!

>ignoring the very obvious reasons it cost so much less

This ignores that US tooling engineers wages would likely have been prohibitive enough to allow enough of them to be coordinated for Apples visions, or that there's enough of them by the time ipod rolled around in 2000s. Some large engineering endeavours takes a lot of specialized talent, and at some point PRC enabled access to another tier of scale and cost of talent that most countries couldn't replicate - there was simply a new tier of talent/supply chain agglomeration you get when PRC admin throws 400m bodies at a problem build up entire concentrated industrial parks / supply chains. If X commodity consumer product need 10 units of talent at 10 cost, US only has 5 at the cost of 15, PRC has 40 and can do it for the cost of 8 due to various structural advantages on top of talent access. The more fundemental bottleneck is US simply doesn't have 10 units of talent, and never had the economics of combining 10 units of talent that can do X for the cost of 10, so the envisioned product is not possible in US, ever. Of course Apple could have payed more and settled for less to protect US workers.

> America lacks tooling engineers when the very reason for this is that companies just like Apple started outsourcing

Apple is big. But not that big. It responds to economic signals just like anyone else. The problem is at the policy layer, not individual actors.