Shahram Mokhtari and Arthur Shi, corporate repair tech leads for global franchise chain shop iFixit performed a necropsy of a $500 Trump T1 phone and have thus conclusively identified exactly which cheap piece of shit Chinese budget Android model the T1 is a reskin of and landed on a genuinely unexpected answer: That the base model, the HTC U24 Pro, retails for $450, a surprising price point possibly indicating that the Trump boys are selling their not that cheap phone at a loss.
“The spring finger contacts on the flash hadn’t moved at all; instead, the flex cable was simply lengthened in what amounts to nothing more than a cosmetic change. There was one other small cosmetic change: the speaker grille. The aluminium chassis, while almost identical, has holes that are machined out with a slightly different pattern,” Mokhtari and Shi write in their report which you can absolutely click on the link above to read if you enjoy such minutely-detailed phone jargon.
For those less-interested, the bottom line is that this particular scam does not in the most commonly-held understanding of industrial capitalism appear to be particularly lucrative for the Trump boys. Key words there being “commonly-held understanding” as there’s probably some “understanding” in which some other party eats the losses while they collect their fee no matter what happens with the phone’s sales – which the two mobile device eggheads write that, against pretty much everyone’s expectations, “is actually well priced compared to the equivalently specced 512GB U24 Pro, and the only things you give up are the 60W fast charging and your dignity.”
They also observe it’s a flop as the sourcing of the battery tracks with other data. “Seeing a battery cell made in the Philippines tells us that the T1 is unlikely to be selling in large volumes. This would be in line with the recent data breach that revealed Trump Mobile’s combined sales of phones and plans was in the region of 30,000, well short of earlier claims of 600,000 smartphone pre-orders.”
Meaning that if you were surprised that the T1’s Chinese base model’s price is give or take nearly three times what you originally might have expected, take comfort in Uday and Qusay being full of shit about its sales numbers. That part of your priors on this whole venture was confirmed neatly.
Oh and that it’s not made in the United States. That was complete bullshit all along too.