Comment by kelnos

> and now, with this trade war, it's clear consumers will bear the burden.

"Now"? The trade war has been on since what, 2017?

> There's nothing inherently beneficial about manufacturing in the U.S. other than symbolic gestures tied to identity politics.

While I think that argument can be made in general, if you consider certain sectors and certain products, the calculus changes. Onshoring chip production is a matter of national security. Not necessarily in the "big bad China will take over Taiwan and put backdoors in our chips" sense (though that's certainly a concern), but in the sense of not being dependent upon an adversarial state for fundamental advanced technology.

> Most consumers want affordable, high-quality products

Sure, but that's not sustainable. You end up playing "chase the country with the worst worker protections". This isn't the case of chips (yet?), but there are quite a few things where China used to be the go-to for manufacturing, but production has moved elsewhere because costs went up, and it's cheaper to stop doing it in China. The long-term end result of all this is that everywhere has labor costs that have gone up enough that offshoring doesn't really buy you all that much.

Of course you can say, "okay, maybe that's true, but at least I can get my cheap iPhone now, and moving production to the US hurts that now, rather than decades from now". And I'm somewhat sympathetic to that. But ultimately Apple may just have to change how it prices things if it costs more to make iPhones. They already make solid profit on each unit, and perhaps they'll just have to make do with less of a markup.

> Instead of focusing on where products are made, the priority should be on ensuring that they are durable and not part of a system of planned obsolescence

I feel like Apple is a pretty bad example for you to use here. I had to replace my perfectly-functional, four-year-old Pixel 4 last year because it stopped getting software updates after three and a half years. Meanwhile my wife has a six-year-old iPhone that will update to the latest major version of iOS tonight, and it will likely keep getting updates for a couple more years. My new Pixel 8 will supposedly get major OS updates for seven years. If I break the screen on my phone or the battery gets bad, I can get them replaced fairly affordably. These are improvements!

Apple's repair situation is worse, but that's a choice Apple has made. If they wanted to focus on repairability, next year's iPhone would be the most repairable phone on the market. But they don't want to do that. Moving manufacturing around is orthogonal to all that.