[Ccecil]

As a small US contract manufacturer working largely in Opensource Hardware I applaud their efforts. It is a step forward...even if it costs more.

There are many people in the US who would pay more for a phone made in the US. It isn't just military/govt. Although, they are not the majority.

I got into electronics in the mid/late 90s when there was still a lot of development and production in my area. I watched it largely move out of country and quite a few mid/high paying jobs largely disappear.

It still costs quite a bit more to have boards made in the US (unless you get your own equipment) but with the tariffs, shipping and possibility of further issues between our governments it starts to become fairly close to being worth the effort, at least for some things. It would just take one or two lot rejections or a batch lost in shipping to make it not worthwhile for a mid sized producer. Large companies can absorb and plan in advance...small companies the loss may not be sizable...but the mid size company very well may have most of their eggs in the same basket so to speak.

I have had fairly good results with our Chinese manufacturer over the last 8 years or so but doing our own in house QA/Test is absolutely required. There has been very few batches where we could have got away with not doing so.

In our case we are doing small batch production in house while doing larger batches from China but since we have the machines in house and we can order parts from anywhere there is very little reason to not do our own in house production entirely. This allows for much tighter control over the process as well as defect mitigation on the fly during production. The next few years are going to be very interesting for manufacturing worldwide. I expect it won't just be the US who is looking to bring at least a portion back to their country...or to countries which are cheaper/easier to work with.