What does "Assembled in Finland" mean?
Pick and place PCB assembly is very different from the final assembly of batteries in terms of who is capturing value and building a reasonable moat. Their sales angle is around European autonomy.
Low wage workers putting batteries in phones is not that, but PCB assembly is much closer to that.
Or am I just spoiled by apparent local regional abundance of cheap roboticists?
Hiring people to put batteries in phones and phones in boxes? Never done that specifically, but other assembly line stuff like that does not require much. Certainly not a multi year culture building process. I used to work for a company that built food gift boxes. When we staffed up for the holiday season, it took about 20 minutes to train new hires. We once added an entire line in a day to make a custom product. I’m not saying that the managers and workers didn’t work hard, but it was not particularly complex work. Most of the difficulty was in finding ways to reduce packing times by a few percentage points.
Put this way: your company have a week to build one of the above processes for 1500 phones a week, and they get a $1mm bonus if they succeed. Do you choose pick and place assembly or battery assembly.
OTOH, I'm not sure how much it matters. Apple products are "designed in California" (which is a bit of a lie to begin with), and very much assembled overseas.
Of more interest is how few units they've pre-sold compared to mainstream phones. I wish them well, but I doubt they'll change history.
I've seen "Packaged in $country" on boxes before, so I suspect they are two different things.
Like food made in Canada that shows up in American chain stores being labeled "Distributed by QFC." There's lots of rules about this sort of thing.
Reminds me of back in the late 90's when Wal-Mart was all rah-rah about "Made in the USA!" on all of its products. Then my company bought every employee a Sam's Club membership and the cards were all marked "Litho en Mexico."