The question of why Apple still can’t make the iPhone in America points to a wider challenge: moving production takes more than choosing a new factory location. A product depends on a network of suppliers and specialized manufacturing capabilities, and that network can be hard to recreate in a different place.
A factory needs an ecosystem
Economist Willy Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, has argued that manufacturing plans need to be judged by what it takes to make them work. The Foxconn proposal for an LCD factory in Wisconsin offered a clear example. Shih said the project lacked a key part of the supply chain: a glass plant nearby.
He also examined the plans for the factory itself. In his view, the plans did not include enough concrete to support a panel factory, which would need structural steel and concrete for stability. The lesson applies beyond LCD screens: a factory is part of a larger system, and the necessary facilities and suppliers have to be available for production to work.
That helps explain why relocating a product’s assembly does not automatically relocate the whole supply chain. A company might move assembly to Vietnam or Mexico in response to tariffs, while important production capabilities remain elsewhere. Changing one step can alter where goods are assembled without rebuilding every part of the manufacturing network.
Economics shapes where goods are made
Shih’s book, Where Does My Stuff Come From? The Powerful Economics Behind Global Supply Chains, examines the economic forces behind those networks. His examples show that the route a product takes can look surprising until the costs and incentives are considered.
Cashews may be labeled as coming from Vietnam even when they were grown in the Ivory Coast or Ghana. Frozen fish caught off the coast of Alaska may travel to Qingdao, China, for processing before returning. In Shih’s account, these arrangements reflect the economics of production: processing in a particular place can be cheaper.
The same logic complicates efforts to bring manufacturing home. A factory’s location is connected to the cost and availability of the work and inputs around it. If those advantages are concentrated in an existing manufacturing hub, announcing a new factory elsewhere does not by itself create the surrounding network.
Tariffs can redirect trade without rebuilding production
Trade barriers put pressure on companies to adjust, but the first response may be to find a different route through the supply chain. Shih describes manufacturers shifting assembly to Vietnam or Mexico, or seeking other ways to avoid tariffs on goods coming out of China.
The article also describes a surge in imports from Ireland in the first quarter of 2025, followed by slower imports in the first half of 2026. It links that pattern to companies bringing goods in ahead of expected changes and later drawing down those earlier imports. Trade figures, in this account, can reflect companies responding to policy uncertainty as well as changes in where products are ultimately made.
Those adjustments matter for claims that production is returning to the United States. A changed shipping route or assembly location may be a response to trade rules, rather than evidence that the full set of manufacturing capabilities has moved. The article says factories expected to reshore in America mostly had not materialized.
China’s manufacturing base is difficult to replace
China remains a manufacturing powerhouse even as other countries see dependence on it as risky. The article points to LCD production as one example: flat panel factories supplying television sets are in China, where plants have been supported by subsidies or industrial policies.
That context helps put the iPhone question in perspective. The challenge is not simply whether a company can assemble a device in a new country. It is whether the broader supply chain can support that production at workable cost. Political pressure and tariffs can change companies’ choices, but the economics and infrastructure behind existing manufacturing hubs continue to shape what moves and what stays.
Shih’s central point is that global supply chains respond to practical incentives. Understanding those incentives helps explain why a reshoring promise may not become a functioning factory, and why making the iPhone in America remains a more complicated task than relocating assembly.