- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
It’s not an iphone, but American-made smartphones exist. They just need a bit of investment.
Here’s the thing, supply chains have intermediate components and it’s almost certain that liberty phone will have these components in its supply chain as well.
The chart above is the key one. First look at the two bars on the left hand side. This is what conventional trade statistics tell you about the dominance of China as a supplier to American manufacturers: up from being the main provider of inputs to about 5% of sectors in 1995 to just over 60% in 2018. That’s pretty striking. But now look at the two bars on the right. These are the authors’ measure which includes all those intermediate inputs (a far more complex picture) and it turns out China is the main source of these goods for about 95% of all American industrial sectors.
One obvious takeaway from the paper: whoa, America is far more reliant on China than it thought. But actually this underplays the complexity. Think back to our Brandauer electrode. The chances are that it was made of metals which were originally refined in China (I’m guessing here, but given China is the world’s biggest metal refiner this is not implausible). Those metals were then shipped to the UK where they were turned into the micron-accurate electrodes I saw being turned out of the machines in Birmingham. Then they were shipped back to another factory, probably in China, where they were put inside a rear view mirror.
https://edconway.substack.com/p/globalisation-is-a-far-far-bigger
More on the Liberty Phone
Besides the absurd cost ($1,999) for the terrible specs. It seems they’re hiding where they’re sourcing certain components like you said like the CPU, GPU,
yeah that’s pretty sketchy
Isn’t the iMX 8M in the Liberty phone still made overseas? In which case it won’t be exempt from the tariffs.