Teardown finds that the Trump phone is practically the same as an HTC handset

The only functional difference between the T1 and the HTC U24 Pro is the battery, iFixit discovered.

A teardown of the Trump Mobile T1 revealed that it's basically the same as an HTC handset. After looking at the guts of the Trump phone, iFixit — which got its hands on a unit first procured by NBC News — concluded it's practically identical to the HTC U24 Pro. The only real differences are a battery with a slightly larger capacity (with support for 30W rather than 60W charging) and that gaudy gold paint.

Otherwise, there are some very minor cosmetic changes like different positioning for the camera array and an alternate pattern of holes for the speaker. The chipset — with the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB of storage — is fundamentally the same, though the board housing in the Trump phone is from Micron, while the U24 Pro has one from SK Hynix.

Trump Mobile — which initially claimed the T1 was "made in the USA" — insists the device has "American-proud design," whatever that's supposed to mean. It claims the T1 is "shaped by American innovation" and was "designed with American values in mind." While the phone may be "proudly American," it certainly wasn't made in the US .

The pipeline to make all of the components for the phone entirely in the US doesn't exist as things stand. Trump Mobile now says the T1 is "proudly assembled in the US," suggesting that a team in the country is responsible for putting together around 10 components.

The $499 Trump phone's battery is made in the Philippines, but most of the components are from China. Looking at all the evidence, iFixit posits that "the only place the T1 could have been made in the very short time the brand has existed, in the limited quantities it's being produced, and at the same price point as the U24 Pro, is at the factories with preexisting tooling and production lines for this phone." It concluded the T1 is "a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China."