The thing is, production is not a high profit industry anymore, unless you are a specialist (something US retains). Shove the low margin business overseas, and keep the high margin ones inshore (development). You simply cannot afford to keep the production inshore unless someone is subsidising the production, and at the moment no one is willing to do that.
I don't believe you've got the same grasp on the issue here, so can you help me walk through the logic you're using. As I can't understand your logic, will you point out where our understandings differ?
Manufacturing is where both Samsung and Apple make their money initially, but Apple doesn't stop there. They take in materials and components, create a finished good, and sell it to the providers at a specific margin. Part of their costs are software and hardware development. So you take in $240 worth of parts per phone. You contract 300,000 phone sales world-wide. You spend $900,000 on developing the software, and $1,800,000 on developing the phone. The break even price of the phone (Samsung to phone company) is therefore labor+$249. Assuming that labor is higher (manufactured anywhere but China), you must increase the selling price. Companies don't take a financial loss, because if they do they cease to exist.
Now Apple and Samsung differ vastly on the development side. Apple enjoys touting that they are 100% US based. They also sell vastly more units, due to brand recognition. For a moment, let's say that for every Samsung piece of hardware sold there are two pieces of Apple hardware. Does the increased cost of US development hurt Apple? NO. They can spend twice as much on development. Rather than starting with a barebones OS and adding features (android), they can develop everything from the ground up. Apple can implement a walled garden. Every piece of software sales suddenly becomes a sale for Apple. Samsung, meanwhile, doesn't earn a penny in software sales because they use an open source platform.
We've seen that Apple and Samsung are fundamentally the same on the manufacturing side. Development is the only place where they differ. Apple is very closed, so they can control everything post sale. They tout a better experience, because they can control everything. Samsung touts better specifications. They get to do everything, but things break far more often.
The real question is how consumers respond, and herein lies the problem. Both of these devices a subsidized by the service providers. Without the 66% or higher subsidies from retail price people would purchase differently. A clean interface, with functionality nerfed, is acceptable at the $200 price point. You get something with less features that a PC, but a similar experience and speed for less cost. Samsung tries to give the PC speed and features, but also shares the PC instability. The uninformed consumer only sees a $200 price tag, and makes the assumption that some errors aren't acceptable at such a low price point. They would weigh the decision differently if the full $600 retail price were on display.
In the background, Samsung has moved on to developing the next phone model. Apple has begun to rest on their laurels, because their lock on software sales will bouy the company for months, before they need to crank up development efforts on the next revision.
In short, you buy a business model. Either rich features that are sometimes problematic, or locked down but generally more stable. Apple has done an excellent job of making their brand known, which has allowed them to compete differently. Samsung competes in the more traditional manner of new features and lower prices. "Stupid American cultural supremacists," while existing, aren't the driving force. The people hiding the true costs and selling experience/branding over capability are what makes Apple work.
While I hate Apple, but they deserve acknowledgement for making this crap acceptable. At no other point in my memory could a less featured product be sold at the same price, and outstrip competitor sales so totally as the iPhone does. -golf clap-