The context of this conversation is the root level comment noting a Bloomberg article where it's stated it would take them 8 years to move 10% of their manufacturing capacity to other countries from China.

Now, it still may be true that it's easier to manufacture iPhones than design them, but easier does not mean easy. Personally, I think you're just vastly underestimating how hard it is to manufacture iPhones at scale, which means not just finding the right part, but a part that can be delivered in the quantity and quality required to meet their production needs, and repeated for all the parts they need.

Designing a new iPhone that does everything the old one does slightly better has very little value added.

Being able to replace broken iPhone12s with new iPhone12s is real. An iPhone18XR on paper is just a piece of paper.

If what you said were true, there would have been lots of Chinese phone manufacturers eating Apple's market share for lunch. There aren't.

Patents are worthwhile only as far as they are respected. A factory is a real asset employing many real people.

Anyway, why does SV have a lock on design? If anything computer design has gotten very stale since the early 90s when all the competitors to American computer systems finally croaked

That still doesn’t change the fact that a tiger without teeth may roar as loud as they can, but still won’t be able to bite you.