Besides the low chance that he’s outright lying, the Marianas Islands, Guam and American Samoa all can get the “made in America” claim. Puerto Rico too, but do you know how many millions every citizen there gets tax-free every year?
$45 a month is like some 2-4 year (or whenever he leaves office ) monthly “plan” where you get the phone along with the plan and I assume the USA has now gone GSM with sim-cards? 10 years ago the only choice there was only very expensive T-Mob and AT&T when I visited for a few months with my Socialist Euro phone.
I don’t need much data yet for about $12 a month I’d get 15Mb on a phone I bought. I’ve bought all my phones outright.
And while there is no way I would trust any trump phoney, I assume the service is piggy-backing on a larger company which is common here?
OMG. $499 for the phone plus a monthly fee of $47.45.
(and I meant about $12 for 15Gb of data, Maybe 20. I usually only need less than 5 so pay about $6 a month - even less if I paid for a year yet this gives me flexibility to up it to whatever i might need).
Our last Pixel phones were less than half that amount. No, they weren’t made in the good ole USA, but in this case, that is most likely a bonus. I would shy away from a made in the US phone. Why would I trust a country that doesn’t make electronics like this?
BTW, I searched or “made in US cellphones” and I found one - the Purism Librem 5. Go check it out and let me know if you would ever buy that $1600 phone. Me? HELL NO!
A lot of that is just scale (how many sold) yet I was ready to “buy into” the idea that this was an exercise in making a completely USA (50 states + PR) electronic device, yet in the wiki it shows a Dutch CPU and and Samsung and the other companies that makes much of the tech: cameras, flash memory, RAM and display are all foreign.
I do like that it runs native Linux (not Android or iOS) yet couldn’t help but imagine a downsized Raspberry Pi Zero (British & Sony) for about $500. Though admittedly, I’ve never made a phone with cell data out of a Pi yet that couldn’t add too much more to the cost.
Yet the sad fact is, to make new top of the line cell phones, you’ve got to rely on very low paid Asian labor.
I recall at least with the Marianas, the republicans somehow changed their status so they could be considered “American Made” and last I looked, a Hanes-beefy-T truly made in America with American combed cotton was much better than what you can buy at Wal-mart.
And these places have very little tech capacity unless you’re willing to invest and pay them a decent wage. Yet that notion and unions are now positively un-American.
This is the bottom line. The idea is to get the dweebs and suckers to buy these phones because they are associated with the Trump name, and sign up for phone service. I’m sure there will be all kinds of add-ons, surcharges, usage fees, and other things to drive the monthly bill way up. There will probably be some kind of unbreakable contract so you can never cancel. Of course, the phones will not be refundable, so who cares about the quality of the instrument? The main thing is to get these people to commit to forking over monthly payments forever.
CDMA still carries about half the market, and it seems like they have really good coverage in some areas where there is little-to-no GSM. Most phones and tablets have a transceiver that can be configured for either protocol, but some carriers put in a worm that all but prevents a buyer from being able to reconfigure to the alternative protocol, or to work with a different carrier.
As to SIM cards, not so much. In many cases, one installs an “eSIM”, which is downloaded into the phone (no waiting for a card to be delivered, but also less data portability). The US phone market is kind of fucked up and will remain so until some sort of social sea change occurs, and the corporations that control the market will fight change tooth and nail.
How come the US market can still get away with that?
I know Singapore moved away from CDMA in the early 2000s, and has full number portability between all carriers.
Nee Zealand you also have full number portability amongst all carriers
The market is basically controlled by the businesses that play in it. This is largely true of most of the markets in the US. Americans have free choice – among the things that business decides should be available and desirable. It is a free market in the sense that business is free to decide what Americans can and want to have.
Thanks for that, @Monty , especially for the remarks from Charlotte Clymer. They are quite interesting and insightful, especially about the precision that the US Army can demonstrate when necessary, and the lackadaisical attitude displayed by the troops in Trump’s parade.
Do we have any indication of how Trump feels about his parade’s poor attendance and imprecision in marching?
I was very surprised to see the caliber of marching. The majority of my time in service was Navy, but I did start out Army. As one would imagine, marching was a big thing and, yes, I lost count of the times I was basically “sleep marching” along with so many others.
I could see route march if the unit is along a stretch of the parade route that’s not designated for the show, but in front of the reviewing stand? That’s a definite no-go.
Well, we can be sure that he doesn’t believe what his own lying eyes saw. Here’s a picture from the DOD that I’m sure he does believe. Yep. People watching the parade from all the way over by the Washington Monument. What a view they had!
