General Discussion

1. Anyone who asks "can we start manufacturing phones, etc on a small scale via crowd funding"

... has no idea of the scale of manufacturing that is required to make sophisticated high tech products, and the integrated supply chains involved. I'm not an expert of any kind in that area, but I know it is not from a lack of buildings that it is not being done.

Sure, a crowd funded startup could make a phone three times as heavy as an iPhone and with much less reliability and with no integration into the Apple network / app store. And a price tag twice as high. Sure, within a few years a smart small company could get all of those negatives substantially reduced ... by using supply chains largely rooted in other places, like Apple does.

In any case there are lots of competitors, sophisticated industrial giants, producing phones.

There's a lot more to making phones than repurposing empty buildings. Buildings are the least of worries for smart phone manufacturers.

Yes, we could bring phone manufacturing back to the US. But absolutely not on a small scale. A small company could not sell modern phones made in the US at a profit. If you can't sell your products at a profit your comany doesn't last long.

Modern electronics manufacturing is about scale, not smarts or difficulty. No matter how hard you wish, that's the reality.

2. A factory can't just start cranking out high tech devices like phones overnight

It would take years to setup and doing it small scale would not be remotely profitable. No profit means no one is going to do it. The manufacturing processes for stuff like that is very complex and takes years to spin up from scratch.

15. Do you know how to do either?

They are building a couple of new electronics manufacturing plants near Austin. It takes years and billions of $$$$. One of the biggest problems is bringing in water for the manufacturing plant for the fabrication processes from a hundred miles away. And dealing with the toxic chemical waste from semiconductor manufacturing. Are your "crowd funders" ready to deal with those issues for their re=purposed buildings.

The sentiment is admirable, but reality is real (and expensive.)

26. its actually much harder than brain surgery

semiconductor manufacturing requires more complex facilities, ultra specialized equipment, and even rarer skill sets.

There are good reasons it takes years and billions of dollars to set up a new chip manufacturing facility.

If you are simply talking assembly of finished phones from components manufactured elsewhere, then you would run into a different set of challenges. One is availability of components, another is economies of scale, and the last is competition/cost. An 'assembly' type manufacturing facility would need subsidies to prop it up in perpetuity.

Not saying these are insurmountable, but manufacturing today is far different and more specialized than it was even 20 years ago.

47. {...}
It is not impossible to make phones in the United States. However, it is not something that can be done through crowdsourcing, nor is it something that can just move into an empty building and start shipping phones in a short time. If you had any experience in technology manufacturing, you would not suggest that such a thing was possible.