Why aren't iPhones made in America?

In yesterday's Business Day section of the New York Times, an explanation by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher of How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work recalls the question President Obama asked Steve Jobs last February in Woodside, California: What would it take to make iPhones in the United States? Why can't that work come home?

According a fellow dinner guest, Jobs' dismissive reply was “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible...” 

     Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” an executive said.

     The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.

     For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

     Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory...