How a $2,000 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured (Librem 5 / Liberty Linux Phone)

QUOTE:

"Earlier this week I wrote an article called “A US-Made iPhone Is Pure Fantasy." The long and short of it is that Trump’s dream of moving all high tech manufacturing to the US is extremely difficult because global supply chains are so intricate, manufacturing expertise exists primarily in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries, and the components that go into a phone are often made in other countries as well.

But there is currently one smartphone that qualifies for a “Made in the USA” title from the FTC. It’s the Liberty Phone, which is made by a company called Purism. The phone is a version of Purism’s Librem 5. The Made-in-China Librem 5 costs $800, and the Liberty phone costs $2,000. It has 4 GB of memory, and reviewers say that its specs are pretty outdated. Not every single component in the Liberty Phone is made in the USA, but the company has been trying very hard to make it as American-made as possible. The fact that it exists at all is kind of a miracle, and the way that Purism is approaching manufacturing is really interesting, so I called Purism’s founder, Todd Weaver, to talk about smartphone supply chains, making tech products in the United States, and tariffs. Here’s our discussion, which has been edited for length and clarity. The full, hour-long discussion is available here as a bonus episode of the 404 Media podcast:

404 Media: What you're doing is super interesting and I know you've been doing it for a while. I know that there's been tons of discussion over the last few weeks about bringing manufacturing back to the United States, the difficulty of doing that with different supply chains and components and things like that. And I know to the best of your ability, you've brought the Liberty Phone to the U.S. Can you tell me a little bit about what the Liberty Phone is and how long you've been doing it for?

Todd Weaver: So the first thing is I started the company, Purism, in 2014. The original business plan is actually what we were able to execute on over the course of the last 10 years, and looking at doing a fair number of things different than is currently done.

One of those is US manufacturing for a lot of reasons, secure supply chain, where we get to manage all the components, full transparency, I can also release my schematics. And then that gets us to where we're really targeting that security market as well, because the security market needs to have control and also verify the claims of any technology stack being used. When I started the company, we also did laptops. And then I knew I wanted to get to the point of phones. But I also knew that I had to increment my way there by building laptops first, showcasing that I'm able to do all of that on the hardware, software services side, and then get to the point of the phone. When we did the phone, it was the Librem 5 phone.

After we were successful on the Librem 5 crowdfunding campaign, we took our own electronics engineers (EEs), and then we worked with Chinese design and manufacturing through 2018, 2019, and 2020, because that's where every phone is made.

We had to leverage the knowledge base that was offshored into that country to do so. And so at that point, we were able to take our designs and educate our staff on the entire process and produce the Librem 5. And then we were able to take all those designs and spin up our own SMT, it's called Surface Mount Technology, where we can actually produce the entire electronics of the device at our facility, therefore bringing it back to US soil. And so we have a few different SKUs of our product offering that are manufactured in our facility.

We have a varying degree of the country of origin for components or the total product. So on one end of that spectrum, you have our server, which is an Intel reference design manufactured out of China, and then we're importing it. And then you go through the whole scale all the way down to Liberty Phone and our Librem Key that are 100% produced at our facility in Carlsbad, California.

On those two products we take the printed circuit board, which is just a blank board that has no components and run that through our surface mount technology by our line operators. And so we go from resistors and capacitors and integrated circuits, put them all on the board, take it off the board, do quality control, any firmware loading. Then we assemble the entire phone and then do a software load for the customer and then ship it direct. That whole process is top to bottom done at our facility.

There’s a difference between a phone that is fully made and manufactured in the United States and one that is assembled in the United States. Do you believe that you're manufacturing the phone from start to finish in the United States?

There's no question about it. The difference is actually defined by the FTC. "

The rest at: https://www.404media.co/how-a-2-000-made-in-the-usa-liberty-phone-phone-is-manufactured/