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Tech

Smashing Foreign Phones

What's keeping the iPhone, a hugely popular status symbol of a device, from being manufactured in the U.S. of A.?

This past Saturday the New York Times dropped what amounts to a tsar bomba onto the already-volatile environment currently enveloping the tech industry and the contentious debate about jobs, the American middle class, and globalization. The piece, by Keith Bradsher and Charles Duhigg, began with a simple question, one that President Obama put to Steve Jobs at that fancy Silicon Valley dinner last year: What’s keeping the iPhone, a hugely popular status symbol of a device, from being manufactured in the U.S. of A.?

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Jobs famously told Obama that those manufacturing jobs, since sent overseas, aren’t ever coming back. The reasons are myriad, and don’t solely revolve around Chinese factories paying workers lower wages. The shift is more fundamental and systemic, and as pointed out in an excellent rebuttal by ZDNet, isn’t necessarily entirely negative. Both stories are more than worth a read, as they both offer valuable insight into the behemoth gadget industry and the impulses that drive it.

Read the rest at Motherboard.