Okay, sure, I’ll play devil’s advocate. The engineering that goes into a single iPhone is unfathomable. It would take an entire lifetime of study to even try to produce something close.

But Apple pays about a jillion engineers about a jillion dollars each, and so they’re able to create new iPhones every year or so. That was 100% powered by capitalism.

Yeah, workers physically put the pieces together. Do you think any of them could design an iPhone without any help or reference?

Is the “help or reference” coming from other workers?

Eventually the money to start the process comes from somewhere like a bank or private loans. Sure, the workers could fund the venture by themselves, but nobody wants to take that kind of risk. Taking a job at a company is basically paying money to avoid risk.

Entry to the market is a bigger obstacle than risk. You can’t just make a phone at home from scraps. You need an army of workers and machines and supply chains and business relationships and licenses.

You don’t actually have to have any of those things because you can have other companies make those parts for you and then even hire a company to assemble it for you. Apple doesn’t make screens or tiny screws or batteries. At least they don’t have to I’m not sure how their supply chain works. You could do presales on a site like Kickstarter and make the phone. The issue is getting enough people to buy it in order to make it viable as all of those companies are going to charge you a set up fee, so the more parts you buy, the lower the cost per part. You’d also have to design a phone that gives people a compelling reason to buy it. Selling stuff is hard probably harder than making the product itself. You’d also need the usual business overhead like an accountant and an attorney.

That’s still market entry as the biggest obstacle, rather than risk. Getting enough people to buy it in order to make it viable is, itself, a factor of how much can be invested in marketing the phone. Designing a phone still requires at least a team of workers, if not an army, because that requires designing both the phone and software in addition to making it all work together in a usable product.

You also can’t just start up a phone company from a lemonade stand. You need starting capital. Hence, market entry.

I would start by making a dev board in an SBC form factor like the raspberry pi and use an os like graphene and make it compatible with Linux. You could sell that and have your backers do testing for you while you build the rest of the phone. Then once the phone was built you could try to build an os of your own.

I’m pretty sure your cobbled together hackathon project wouldn’t be functional as a phone, cell towers wouldn’t communicate with it and it wouldn’t make calls. Also, where did you even get backers? How did you attract them and scam them out of their money? And now you’re using them to outsource your labor team??

Market barriers are real.