Purism boss Todd Weaver has spent a decade trying to piece together a made-in-America smartphone. He’s got the motherboard built in-house, the chip comes from an NXP fab in Texas, and the rest is assembled in sunny Carlsbad, California. The screen and battery come from China and the camera is Korean. Turns out, there are just no US companies churning out smartphone screens or cameras at scale.

Weaver reckons it costs $650 to make the Liberty Phone. For reference, the iPhone 16 Pro Max, a device that doesn’t look like it came out of a bunker, costs about $550 to make in China, according to TechInsights. And that’s with high-end cameras, an OLED screen and some app support.

The Liberty Phone doesn’t run Android or iOS. It runs PureOS, which mostly does calls, texts, basic web, and a calculator. Its chip isn’t even meant for phones and is designed for cars. But Weaver says the Liberty Phone isn’t competing with the other phone brands.

The reality is that scaling US phone manufacturing is a nightmare. Weaver says he could ramp up to 100,000 units a month but needs more machines, more space and investment. He’s sold fewer than 100,000 units. 

Even with tariffs, US phone-making won’t be cheaper unless America suddenly starts pumping out OLEDs, application processors and all the other gubbins that make modern phones work.

Counterpoint Research director Jeff Fieldhack said: “Cost aside, we don’t have factories here building application processors, high-end displays or most of the other things in your smartphone.”

So when Trump says he’s got a $499 US-made phone in the pipeline, Purism’s Liberty Phone is the closest anyone’s come to that fantasy. And it costs four times more and runs on a chip meant for your SUV. 

Until there’s actual domestic infrastructure, Weaver’s Liberty Phone remains a niche curiosity for privacy buffs, not a blueprint for Apple or Samsung. The dream of building a proper smartphone in the US isn’t dead, but it’s running a ten-year-old processor and costs $1,999.