Since the recently announced trade tariffs targeting China and other countries where consumer electronics are manufactured, there has been mounting pressure to bring tech manufacturing back to the United States.
Unfortunately, the US doesn't have the facilities, nor the experience, to manufacture devices such as Apple's iPhone at the scale necessary to meet demand. Despite these challenges, work is being done to make US consumer electronics manufacturing a reality, and one example has popped up demonstrating the difficulty of releasing a USA-made electronic device at a reasonable price.
Purism has unveiled the Liberty Phone, a home-grown device that comes with some concessions compared to Apple's iPhone or other major smartphones on the market. Firstly, the Liberty Phone is priced at $1,999, as the device costs approximately $650 to manufacture.
Unfortunately, that isn't the only concession. Buyers will be making a sacrifice in terms of the hardware they are getting for that $2,000 price tag, and not every single component is sourced from the USA. The Liberty Phone features a motherboard built by the company's California site, the chipset is sourced from NXP's Austin, Texas facility, and the product is assembled locally.
However, the display is sourced from South Korea, and the battery is imported from China. Todd Weaver, Purism's founder, admittedly states, "There are just some parts that don't yet have a supply chain. We're gonna keep incrementing there until we can get to that point."
Moreover, this isn't an Android device, either, as the Liberty Phone runs PureOS, a Linux-based operating system, meaning it doesn't come with support for a wide variety of apps that are commonly used. It, however, does support the fundamentals of a smartphone: calls, texts, and web browsing.
The Liberty Phone stands as an example of the difficulty the US currently faces in bringing electronic manufacturing of smartphones to the USA, and raises further questions about how the recently announced Trump Phone can be "made in the USA" and priced at just $499.
