As Trump pushes Apple to make iPhones in the U.S., Google's brief effort building smartphones in Texas 12 years ago offe [View all]

Source: Fortune

As Trump pushes Apple to make iPhones in the U.S., Google’s brief effort building smartphones in Texas 12 years ago offers critical lessons

Verne Kopytoff
Sat, July 5, 2025 at 2:10 PM EDT 16 min read

The executives were well aware of the difficulties they would face in manufacturing a smartphone in the U.S. As with any great tech industry moonshot, the challenge was part of the appeal—and they embraced it.

“Conventional wisdom said it wasn’t possible,” the company crowed defiantly in a blog post announcing the new America-made smartphone. “Experts said that costs are too high in the US; that the US has lost its manufacturing capability; and that the US labor force is too inflexible.”

Soon, tens of thousands of shiny, new touchscreen phones began rolling off the assembly line at a plant in Fort Worth, Texas every day, and what seemed like a risky endeavor began to look like it could be a milestone—a bold bet on American manufacturing at a time when smartphone giant Apple relied on factories in China, home to cheap labor and legions of suppliers eager to produce electronic components.

That was 2013. And the company behind the bet was Google, which had acquired legacy phone maker Motorola Mobility and was leveraging its modern tech prowess and vast resources to make the Moto X smartphone a success.

Just a year later, it was all over. ...

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Read more: https://tech.yahoo.com/business/articles/trump-pushes-apple-iphones-u-181027224.html

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BTW, Trump Mobile now promises to eventually make its phones in the US. MAGA patriots should be satisfied with Missouri-based customer support for now.