Ah, the irony. I'm not a native English speaker, but I believe the word "fabrication" also has a less used meaning of "made, created" with no falsehood necessarily. A quick web search seemed to confirm this.
Absolutely true! However the innocent-form of 'fabricate'/'fabrication' is mostly used with involved manufacturing/assembly processes, rather than a discovery/transcription process.
So specifically if 'fabrication' is chosen where a simpler word would do, or chosen to contrast with a simpler word, then it acquires increasing implication of falsified/counterfeit work.
If you (or more likely an large team/firm) can 'fabricate' a 'car', good job, you're skilled.
If on the other hand you 'fabricate' a 'paper' or 'result' or 'fact' or 'photo' or 'logo', you're involved in something shady.
When physical objects are fabricated, it means they're created. "Fabricated" never means "of fraudulent provenance", like your iPhone example.
When statements-which-purport-to-be-facts are fabricated, it means they're falsified. So "his claim (that these phones are iPhones) was fabricated" does mean that the phones are not truly iPhones.
As I consider it, this makes some sense; you cannot create a fact, but you can create a physical object, and you can create a lie. Things like an analysis are on the border. And indeed, my intuition as a native speaker accepts "fabricate an analysis" in either sense.
Never say never; I think most American speakers would find that the 'fabricated iPhones' noun phrase implies that the iPhones are counterfeits. Otherwise the adjective would be awkwardly unnecessary – all iPhones are already manufactured. So, it must be there to emphasize (or at least hint at) the other meaning of 'fabricated'.
It's a little bit of an uncommon/sloppy usage, but still clear... more likely to appear in impromptu speech than writing.
'The fabricated iPhones came from this factory', where 'fabricated' means 'produced', is a tautology and hence an ungainly way to present such a sentence ('unfabricated iPhones' wouldn't 'come from' anywhere). As presented, I feel it's more likely for 'fabricated' to mean 'fake', given the context.
