Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
What are you supposed to do, exactly, when the president won’t stop Tasering the economy for fun? As far as the markets go, if you don’t trade stocks or import goods for a living, the conventional wisdom is the same, just delivered in a quieter voice with sweatier pits: Don’t do anything stupid, uh, wait it out, think long term. You could sit and scroll and worry about your job or your retirement or the future more broadly. You could resolve to become more or less politically engaged. Or you could rephrase all this uncertainty and fear in the form of the most American question of all: What should I buy?
Answers are all over the place. Some people are reportedly panic-buying cars, appliances, TVs, and other big-ticket items or at least moving their purchase timelines forward. Others are thinking smaller, reading up on sourcing, and buying with more precision, stocking up on cat food, sunscreen, and hair extensions. Some Asian grocery stores are reportedly busier than usual. People are stocking up on wine and worrying about medicine. But there’s one product about which regular people and Wall Street analysts are unusually and similarly concerned: the iPhone. Mark Gurman surveyed some Apple stores, which employees described as currently comparable to a “busy holiday season”:
Employees from different Apple locations across the country said stores filled with customers over the weekend — with the shoppers expressing concerns that prices will climb dramatically after the levies are imposed. Most iPhones, Apple’s best-selling and most important product, are manufactured in China, which is in line for tariffs of 54 percent. One employee said their store was slammed with people panic-buying phones: “Almost every customer asked me if prices were going to go up soon,” said the worker, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
As panic-buys go, iPhones — and other Apple products — are emblematic. They’re expensive but hugely popular. Their supply chains are long and complicated but the subject of lots of coverage. Everyone knows Apple became one of America’s strongest companies with the help of Chinese manufacturing, and even if you’re up-to-date on the company’s recent moves to diversify into India, Vietnam, and elsewhere, you know Apple is extremely exposed to tariffs. Smartphones have become a necessity, and people have developed strong expectations around price. They’re worried tariffs could send the cost of iPhones way, way up, and the president is calling out Apple specifically.
Analysts agree: UBS estimated a 30 percent price increase for iPhones manufactured in China, pushing the price of an $1,199 iPhone 16 Pro Max to around $1,500, and that was when the proposed tariff rates were “just” 54 percent, versus the 145 percent Trump now says the rate is. Analysts told The Wall Street Journal that the cost of manufacturing an $1,100 iPhone under the 54 percent regime would increase from $580 to $850. Reuters tallied some plausible costs and came up with similarly eye-popping numbers: a $799 model going to $1,142; a $1,599 model to $2,300, and the budget-oriented 16e from $599 to $856.
Lutnick: “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America.” pic.twitter.com/g9TqxGxLHs
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2025
If, as the administration says, the intention is to move iPhone manufacturing to the United States, these numbers go much, much higher. Wedbush’s Dan Ives outlined a made-in-the-USA iPhone scenario in which a $1,000 phone goes to $3,500.
This is a big round number based on a lot of assumptions that aren’t likely to come true together, but the prospect of a $3,500 iPhone is a useful absurdity. It would be the most expensive smartphone in the world. It would, for the first few years of this theoretical capability build-out, be a shoddier product than its counterparts built elsewhere. It’s a thing that, under the conditions that would produce it, simply would not be produced. The world of the $3,500 iPhone is less like mid-century America than early-COVID America: a place where certain types of things aren’t just out of reach but nearly impossible to obtain.
The $3,500 iPhone is best understood as a symbol of the state of mutually assured destruction between Donald Trump and the broader economy. On one side, the president is threatening tariffs so high they’re indistinguishable from embargos; on the other, the market is saying, well, if you really do that, things well and truly fall apart. The government has immense leverage over Apple and Tim Cook, who negotiated a tariff exemption in Trump’s previous term in exchange for promises to invest more in the U.S. (this time, the arrangement appears to be a bit closer to personal bribery). But Apple has some leverage too, alongside other large companies that help keep the market indexes afloat. Place high and sudden enough tariffs on China — and India and Vietnam, where Apple also manufactures iPhones — and the physical avatar of American capitalism simply ceases to exist. The government is talking as if that option is on the table. I’m guessing Cook knows it’s actually not.
