Buy That New Phone Now

The tariff apocalypse is upon us. Should you buy an iPad?

Some people, it seems, have answered with a resounding yes. Bloomberg reported yesterday that at some Apple stores, “the atmosphere was like the busy holiday season.” Fearing that the price of electronics will increase as a result of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, people are rushing to purchase stuff. If the economy must collapse, at least let it do so after you have obtained a new tablet for $599 plus tax.

The panic-buying is a little funny. First, because if we are on the eve of a global recession, we have bigger things to worry about than new gizmos. Second, because we are still in the haze of a Trump pseudo-reality. The major tariffs will not hit until tomorrow, assuming there isn’t some unexpected reversal in the next several hours, and no one knows for certain how any of this will shake out.

Apple, in particular, is a good case study for the moment. Consumer electronics—and especially smartphones—illustrate perfectly the gulf between the president’s America-first agenda and the inescapable realities of a globalized supply chain. Many articles have suggested that electronics will become much more expensive if the tariffs stick—perhaps by hundreds of dollars. They certainly will become more expensive for companies like Apple to make. Although the company may have clever ways of reducing its costs—by shipping devices from India rather than China, for example—it’s not hard to imagine some of the expense being passed down to consumers. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment.)

This is, however, far from certain. If America enters a recession, depressed demand might lead to some nice markdowns, which you might take advantage of if you’re not financially preoccupied with keeping a roof over your head or food in your kitchen. The Trump administration could also produce some kind of carve-out for Apple and other American tech firms to do business without paying the tax. (Apple, like other major tech companies, has cozied up to Trump; the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, was present for Trump’s inauguration in January.) When the previous Trump administration announced tariffs on consumer goods imported from China, Apple products were exempt. This was in the interest of the president’s America-first agenda. As Neil Cybart, an Apple analyst, explained in a recent edition of his Above Avalon newsletter, “Any action that stands to hurt the iPhone may benefit non-U.S. smartphone manufacturers.” At a certain point, phones are phones, and people will turn elsewhere: Huawei’s latest is covered in vegan leather, has three folding screens, and makes my iPhone 15 look like meemaw’s clunky old Mr. Coffee.

Trump apparently wants the tariffs to revitalize American manufacturing. He is excited, for instance, that Wyoming hamburgers will once again compete with Australian beef. His commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said in an interview over the weekend that “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.” (Never mind that Lutnick immediately said that the work would be “automated.”)

But global supply chains are a tangle that no presidential administration could easily unwind. In 2016, the journalist Konstantin Kakaes explored the possibility of an “All-American iPhone” for MIT Technology Review and determined that such a thing is not really possible: “The iPhone is a symbol of American ingenuity,” he wrote, “but it’s also a testament to the inescapable realities of the global economy.” As things stand, no one country is capable of producing all of the rare-earth elements that go into a single device, and components such as screen glass and processors are also sourced from all over the world. China refines 90 percent of the world’s rare earths; the tantalum in your phone is probably sourced from a mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; its processor likely came from Taiwan. If you want to understand globalization, pay attention to the iPhone.

It would not take an act of God to change this situation, but it might take more than Stephen Miller. America would need an iron resolve, lots of money, and lots of time. Rare-earth deposits exist in the United States—but finding, extracting, and refining them would be tremendously costly and dangerous work. Toxic by-products and environmental devastation would ensue. Americans have been happy to ignore these realities when the work is done elsewhere. Would they be so happy if it were done here? Add to that the need to build factories and fabrication plants for microchips. The effort would demand billions upon billions of dollars of investment over many years, still may not accommodate demand for these products, and would make them drastically more expensive.

In theory, moving some greater amount of electronics manufacturing to U.S. soil could be a beneficial strategy. American technology firms are highly reliant on chips imported from Asia, for instance, which means the supply is vulnerable to disruption. “It would be hard to survive a total cutoff of chips from Taiwan,” Duane Boning, an electrical-engineering and computer-science professor at MIT, told me. The CHIPS Act, signed into law by Joe Biden, has already funded some of this manufacturing in the United States. But tariffs are unlikely to help these efforts, Boning said. (If anything, the costs they would impose on various components might only hurt.)

[Read: Just how badly does Apple need China?]

Consumer electronics are only one way to look at Trump’s tariffs. But keep in mind that Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet are the five most valuable companies in the world—all American, all with products that will be caught in this mess. If the plan doesn’t make sense for them—if the plan will actually hurt their business—then what sense does it make at all?

That said, sense-making is a fool’s errand in this era. What we can do is deal with what’s in front of us. So, sure, buy the new phone or tablet if you have to. But also ask yourself: Do you really have to? If Apple’s prices do rise, the company’s sales could be an early indicator of whether Americans are at all willing to renegotiate their unhealthy relationship with consumerism. For the past decade, technology companies have conditioned buyers to make purchasing expensive gadgets an annual affair through services such as Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program. (There is a reason that each iPhone model ends in a number: People intuitively understand that a 17 is better than a 16 is better than a 15, and so on.) Hundreds of millions of new devices are shipped every year. Not as many old ones are recycled. This is not wonderful: Consumers are taking their cues from the most moneyed corporations to have ever existed, cycling through handheld computers at a rapid clip because they come in new colors and with slightly reconfigured screens.

I’m not innocent of the vanity gadget upgrade. (I recently sacrificed a mostly fine old Kindle for a mere $5 trade-in credit on a newer model.) But I also know that those toxic rare-earth pools exist in great part because of the endless production of phones, computers, tablets, game consoles, and televisions. Meanwhile, many of these gadgets last longer than they might have even a few years ago, thanks to higher-quality materials, and are easier to fix due to the growing popularity of “right to repair” laws. The device in your hand would be a miracle in any other age. Nothing is certain right now. Chaos is everywhere. At least you can hold on to this.