>ignoring the very obvious reasons it cost so much less This ignores that US tooling engineers wages would likely have been prohibitive enough to allow enough

>ignoring the very obvious reasons it cost so much less This ignores that US tooling engineers wages would likely have been prohibitive enough to allow enough of them to be coordinated for Apples visions, or that there's enough of them by the time ipod rolled around in 2000s. Some large engineering endeavours takes a lot of specialized talent, and at some point PRC enabled access to another tier of scale and cost of talent that most countries couldn't replicate - there was simply a new tier of talent/supply chain agglomeration you get when PRC admin throws 400m bodies at a problem build up entire concentrated industrial parks / supply chains. If X commodity consumer product need 10 units of talent at 10 cost, US only has 5 at the cost of 15, PRC has 40 and can do it for the cost of 8 due to various structural advantages on top of talent access. The more fundemental bottleneck is US simply doesn't have 10 units of talent, and never had the economics of combining 10 units of talent that can do X for the cost of 10, so the envisioned product is not possible in US, ever. Of course Apple could have payed more and settled for less to protect US workers.