Engineers Tore Apart the $499 Trump Phone and Found a Two-Year-Old Chinese-Parts Device That Retails for Under $200 at Walmart

A physical teardown of the Trump Mobile T1 has confirmed what engineers long suspected: the £393 ($499) smartphone sold under a patriotic banner is, in all but branding, a gold-painted version of HTC's 2024 U24 Pro, a Taiwanese-designed phone built in China.

Repair experts at iFixit, working alongside NBC News journalists at their San Luis Obispo laboratory, dismantled a T1 unit and ran it through a Lumafield CT scanner on 10 June 2026. The radiographs and physical inspection found the T1's internals to be a near-exact replica of the HTC U24 Pro, a mid-range handset using Chinese-sourced components.

The device arrived nine months past its original August 2025 launch date, and the box it came in now reads 'Proudly Assembled in the USA' rather than the original 'Made in the USA' claim that appeared when pre-orders opened.

CT Scan and Physical Teardown Produce Identical Results

Shahram Mokhtari, lead teardown engineer at iFixit, ran the T1 through a Lumafield industrial CT scanner before a single screw was turned. 'Even from the initial radiographs, the answer was clear: the internals are nearly an exact match for the HTC U24 Pro,' Mokhtari wrote in his published teardown.

When the back panel came off, the internal architecture confirmed the scan. The flash assembly had not moved; only the flex cable connecting it had been extended slightly, which Mokhtari described as a purely cosmetic adjustment. The speaker grille displayed a marginally different hole pattern machined into an otherwise identical aluminium chassis. Every other component, including speaker positioning, screw placements and anti-tamper sticker locations, matched.

The mainboard carries Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor, the same chip found in the U24 Pro. One meaningful component-level difference emerged: the T1 uses a Micron multichip package for its 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB of storage, whereas the HTC unit reviewed by iFixit used an SK Hynix package.

Mokhtari attributed this to routine supply chain substitution rather than any fundamental design difference. To confirm the point, iFixit swapped the HTC mainboard into the T1 body, and the phone booted normally.

Battery Source Points to Low-Volume Philippine Supply Chain

The one component that differs substantively is the battery. The T1 carries a 19.35 Wh cell, larger than the U24 Pro's 17.23 Wh pack, though with slower 30W charging compared to the HTC unit's 60W. The battery is manufactured by Newlix Mfg Inc, a company registered with the Philippines Companies House in 2025, roughly in line with the T1's announcement timeline.

Mokhtari noted the significance of a Philippine battery cell in the context of Trump Mobile's domestic assembly claims. The vast majority of consumer electronics batteries originate from China owing to its dominance over raw materials and production capacity.

Sourcing from a smaller Philippine supplier suggests production runs are well short of mass-market volumes. A data breach cited by iFixit revealed that Trump Mobile's combined phone and plan sales were approximately 30,000 units, far below earlier claims of 600,000 pre-orders.

Trump Mobile has stated that the final assembly of roughly ten components takes place in Florida. Mokhtari suggested that the battery, camera modules, USB-C unit, speakers, and haptic engine could feasibly be assembled domestically, but assessed that the display and chassis were most likely imported pre-assembled. The FTC's standard for a 'Made in USA' designation requires that 'all or virtually all' components and labour be domestic. The T1 does not meet that threshold.

The Shifting 'Made in USA' Claims and the FTC Letter

The marketing history of the T1 tells its own story. When pre-orders launched in June 2025, Trump Mobile's website described the device as a 'sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States.' Within ten days, that language had been quietly removed from the site. The phrasing cycled through 'American-Proud Design,' 'designed with American values in mind,' and eventually the current box inscription: 'Proudly Assembled in the USA.'

Trump Mobile spokesperson Chris Walker told USA Today that 'T1 phones are proudly being made in America' and called contrary claims 'simply inaccurate.' Neither Trump Mobile nor the White House responded to NBC News' questions about the device's design relationship to the HTC U24 Pro, or about the American flag on the back of the phone, which has 11 stripes instead of 13.

On 15 January 2026, Senator Elizabeth Warren and ten other Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson requesting an investigation into potential consumer protection violations. The letter asked the agency to determine whether the 'Made in USA' marketing constituted false advertising and whether consumers who paid £79 ($100) deposits for phones not yet delivered had been deceived. FCC filing records show the T1 was filed by Smart Gadgets Global, LLC, a private-label electronics company whose CEO is one of the two Trump Mobile executives who demonstrated the device to reporters in February 2026.

A phone sold on the promise of American manufacturing, for more than double the price of its near-identical source hardware, has now been opened on a workbench in California and found to be made in China.