Final assembly in the US would probably be more expensive due to the following reasons:

1. Parts would still have to be imported. So each part will have tariffs added.

2. Some parts are sourced from China and would therefore face even higher tariffs.

3. Spinning up a final assembly in the US is expensive.

Given the current instability and chaos, starting a multi year project of spinning up a final assembly in the US is a risky move.

What if the tariffs are gone in 4 years? Now you have an expensive final assembly in the US that can't compete with the one in Taiwan anymore.

The US doesn't have sufficient supply of manufacturing skills to do this. Maybe Framework could, but there isn't capacity for most manufacturing of products to move to US assembly. You also can't underestimate the difficulty of that training, it's not just training the workers doing the final assembly, it's the entire org chart being built around manufacturing. China and Taiwan (for consumer electronics) have decades of recent experience in doing this and have highly optimised processes, the US has never had these skills at the volume that Asia does currently, and the last time it was remotely close was decades ago.

If the US decided that the 20-year priority was to be great at manufacturing then sure, it could probably get back to being world-class at this, but there's a reason why countries typically progress out of being manufacturing economies into being service economies – it's just a worse business to be in.

I see you getting downvoted which seems a bit harsh given it seemed like a very honest question. As far as I understand, a huge amount of materials and intermediate steps and companies are over in Taiwan or Shenzen or other places in Mainland China. Even if you could do some parts in the US (like final production) all the sub-components and companies who can actually produce them are dotted over Asia. This is part of the problem in raw economic terms: there is a large vendor and/or geographic lock-in. It's hard to get manufacturing jobs and work back in the US because most of these lines if production are somewhere else and moving one or even a few parts can't overwhelm the huge cost of moving stuff over the ocean potentially multiple times. I read that a brake manufacturer was particularly screwed even within North America because steel came from Canada, partial assembly would occur in Mexico and in the US, and then the finished product might cross a border yet again. Without tariffs this wasn't so bad, but if all the products have to cross a ton of borders a lot of these supply chains are in deep trouble.

> Wouldn’t it make sense then to spin up a separate final assembly within the US?

Like it can just be done?

> Or do their sales not warrant that kind of investment?

It's not so simple. That's the equivalent of other countries thinking they can just spin up a "silicon valley" outside the US. Sales or not it doesn't work like that.

For tarrifs, that seems equivalent to selling the final assembly at cost to a US sales subsidiary? Or would a final laptop have lower tarrifs than its parts?

They're halting the low tier laptops, so it's probably where they don't have enough margin to keep a competitive price.

Take years, and those tariff are going to get removed in the next election anyway