"Exports" is hiding a lot of complexity here. Some export statistics might add the entire price of an iPhone to the export figure for China because that is where the final assembly is done even though (like my previous comment shows) about half of the money from that sale ends up in the hands of Apple's investors, US-based employees of Apple and such US-based suppliers as the companies that built Apple's headquarters and the companies that supply Apple's offices and data centers with electricity.

If we go away back the argument was that the US has no real exports. You've been arguing that phones are an export, but you admit those are built by other countries. It seems fair that the country that makes a phone and then exports it would be given credit for that in the statistics.

I'm not sure what the point of this thread is anymore, so I'll stop here.