What is the cost to make Smartphone in USA? $4

$4? I assume that is the cost of assembling the device in the USA. The benefit of Chinese manufacturing (from what I've read) is that the various factories that make all your parts are right next to each other, so if there's an issue with an order, you can order more parts and literally walk them down the street.

To become really competitive, the USA will need to bring quite a bit of manufacturing back to be able to have that kind of synergy.

However, I would say that I would trust the quality of components here more than from China in terms of better processes and QA.

Someone correct me if I've gotten something wrong here. I don't have any directly experience with any of this.

Blogspam and misleading title. $4 is the difference. Original article http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/28/technology/mobile/moto-x-uni...

"The workers work and live in the factory dormitories – allowing flexible time and really quick manufacturing, something which would never happen in US or the Western Europe."

Its not like thats ever happened in the US.

So assembly is $4. The cost of the parts is $100 I assume? Most of which is manufactured outside the USA?

I haven't read the linked article, but this doesn't sound right. Assembly is mostly a manual process, workers salary must be the biggest cost. Salaries in US are way more that 50% higher than in China.