[AFascistWorld]

The electronics market right now is like fast fashion, people use a thing for 2 years then there are better and shinier things to buy, TVs now come with built-in low-end SoCs that will become obsolete and laggy before long, then hey time to throw it out!

When I was working in a Japanese-owned PCB factory in China, faking/modifing records on the production lines was common as water, to think that this was probably one of the best ones in China or even the world, which supplied for Japanese TVs, DSLRs and iPhones, was eye-opening and somewhat chilling. I don't know if it was the same in Japan tho, people who went there to study said it was awesome and they produced better products using old equipment.

And I just read a story about how testing contractors in Apple's iWatch factories pass basically anything given after the stringen and supervised first batch.

Breaking down just after warranty is perfectly acceptable now, so I guess noboby buys craftsmanship.

[detaro]

> so I guess noboby buys craftsmanship.

Part of the problem is: how do identify it, if even premium brands don't reliably maintain their standards?

[xyzzy_plugh]

Modern manufacturing accounts for this. Any brand worth their salt expect a certain yield to cover bad parts, assembly line faults, etc. There are often multiple QA test stages to account for this. Brands/manufacturers also expect a certain number of RMAs, and set up an RMA process. A good RMA processes can reveal pathological issues (like falsified QA reporting), so good brands/manufacturers will be flexible with their customers as long as they're not being defrauded.

Part of the problem is the big contract manufacturers (like Foxconn) are impossible to compete with on precision/cost.

In a past life, we moved a product from German manufacturing to China, as the German tooling wasn't fine enough to hit our (admittedly insane) tolerances. Whether or not the China MFG lied, they signed the contract and produced the parts. Though, we had to spend a lot of resources on additional testing rigs to weed out the tolerance misses/assembly line faults/bad parts over and beyond what the MFG caught.

Not to mention that exporting stuff from China even 10 years ago was a lesson in geopolitics. Not for the faint of heart. We ended up having Hewlett-Packard (who we were a very large customer of, and white-label resellers for them) export our first thousand or so units in HP boxes. Like night and day.

The overall competitive advantage is hard to capture. Time, money, ethics, work ethic, efficiency. Having an entire country's incentives aligned with extracting a cut of almost all consumer electronics in the world is hard to challenge.

I wonder how the next 15 years will look now that the part seems to be over.

[contingencies]

Part of the problem is the big contract manufacturers (like Foxconn) are impossible to compete with on precision/cost.

I have a tip from speaking to distributors that a large part of the precision story for those guys is that they essentially just buy lots of SCARA robots from the likes of Denso, Toshiba, Yamaha.

Cost .. unsure. Those guys are expensive and time consuming to talk to. They don't get out of bed for small quantities. I'd posit their real advantage is vertical integration and in-house engineering. Those guys can presumably turn out a mold, arbitrary quantity castings or injected parts, solve issues and be in production by Tuesday. Many other firms face 6-8 week wait times per mold iteration, and 2-3 month delays on equipment purchase (let alone production line integration). They also have government support as large employers, so face little issue with exports, land acquisition, etc.

[detaro]

Doesn't really matter if the "it's ok if it breaks just after warranty end" idea comes from manufacturing or design (and breakage during warranty is still quite annoying). In either case, it's quite hard for me as a customer to identify a product that will be reliable, so I can't properly prioritize it. For somewhat fast-iterating products I maybe can buy slightly outdated models and at least avoid some of the bugs, but even that's problematic.

[baybal2]

Apple has 10%-15% return rate in USA

[Brakenshire]

It has to be done at a government level. Requiring the cost of disposal to be put into the initial purchase price, for instance, or mandatory warranty periods.

[xyzzy_plugh]

Yes, but companies can eat these costs relatively easily, or they harm the consumer. These costs should really be baked in at manufacturing time.

RoHS is a good example, but China somehow turned it into a competitive advantage.

[Gibbon1]

> mandatory warranty periods

I've wondered what the effect would be if the dump could force manufacturers to buy back broken appliances that are still under mandatory warranty.

[jdnenej]

It's a little hard to do for some devices but I often look for older devices that people have been using heavily for many years and still work. I check the internet to see what the most common failure points are and how to fix those failures.

[petra]

Buy at amazon.co.jp . The products Japanese people get are most likely much better.

[jotm]

Highly doubt it. They get them from the same manufacturers/suppliers. This idea of "countries X and Y get worse QC products" when the prices are the same needs to die.

Now, buying "Made in Japan" seems plausible. Panasonic has long made laptops in Japan, for the Japanese market only. Check out the Let's Note series, like the CF-SV7, SV8 - you won't find them anywhere else. There seem to be a lot of products that are made in Japan for the internal market only.

[baybal2]

> This idea of "countries X and Y get worse QC products" when the prices are the same needs to die.

I can 100% testify this as true. Big manufacturers do "binning" on the final products just like chip fabs do.

If you see SKUs difference for 1st world and 2nd world countries without any spec difference, it's nearly 100% a case of such binning.

For example Dell diverts laptops with bad displays to Eastern Europe and low income Asian countries (with exception of China, China always gets best bins along with US market because they are afraid of backlash.)

In one Bangladeshi retail chain, every Dell device I saw had a dead pixel, or dust under bond layer. They were almost certainly specifically picking rejects.

Why so? MBA logic.

You definitely can not get so much bad panels if buy pretested panels (which is now standard.) They are picked 100% deliberately.

Defective panels are sold at great discounts, even for 4k and alike panels. So that makes a great temptation. You can near instantly get ~80usd off in case of a 4k panel out of a unit with $400 BOM.

This is why I'm afraid buying just any "premium" good in 3rd world countries. Cheaper devices are a bit safer in that regard as there is not as much incentive to do this with cheaper parts.

Ironically, low-end and mid-tier parts are often having superior reliability and defect rate exactly because there is no margin selling bad QC parts.

[sokoloff]

Related to binning, in the 1960s a lot of small piston airplanes used automotive parts (window latches and voltage regulators on my first airplane came from the Ford supply chain) because of the greater volume there.

Voltage regulator was literally the same part. Ford specified statistical process control and sampling inspection was good enough. Cessna demanded that every voltage regulator be tested.

Solution: run the line, test the percentage of parts Ford demanded, stamp the additionally inspected parts with an additional Cessna part number. At the end of the line, if more parts were tested than Cessna needed, so what? Put 'em in a Ford box and ship 'em.

Cessna and Ford each got what they needed, far more cheaply than they could have individually.

[ProZsolt]

We have a Bosch factory in Hungary but only can buy Malaysian made tools because we export all the local made tools to west Europe.

[jotm]

I am from a poorer European country, and I've never noticed that. But it's a commonly held belief. We're paying the same prices or higher, so I don't see how it makes sense to sell devices that don't pass QC for other countries :/

[baybal2]

> We're paying the same prices or higher

And you are often getting a worse bin or even completely different product under the same name for that! This is 100% true, and the big co will continue doing that for as long as they they think they can get away with that.

Samsung is notorious for that. Some of their devices with the same name can have up to 4 different sets of internals for sale in different countries.

[heavenlyblue]

>> I am from a poorer European country, and I've never noticed that.

I am too. My distant acquaintance does business with a large retailer in the UK where they would buy returned products off the retailer at a much cheaper price (e.g. defects) and resell them in the Baltics.

[mncharity]

An OEM may also source a part from multiple suppliers, of differing quality. As with the "Samsung Panel Lottery". So an OEM sending a model for review, might select one with parts from all the best suppliers, while the one you get off a shelf, is a dice roll. And as you say, a potentially binned roll.

Similarly, with a standard model on a same-day replacement plan, imperfections are likely to come back, with an added site visit cost. But the barrier to returning a customized model is higher. Creating another incentive for binning.

[newnewpdro]

When I decided to buy a used Mk1 RX-100 point and shoot camera a couple years ago, I learned the "Made in Japan" units were in greater demand than the "Made in China" ones, for supposed reliability reasons. Ostensibly identical cameras, just of different provenance according to the sticker.

[bluedino]

Japanese or German built automobiles are often considered higher quality than American-built vehicles from the same company

[petra]

I agree . That's what I meant, but I could have been more clear.

[nrp]

The note on Apple seems implausible. Apple (among other top consumer electronics OEMs) have fairly robust quality control processes that are specifically designed to catch falsification/errors in testing on an ongoing basis. Components and modules are inspected and tested both outgoing from a supplier and incoming at the final assembler, and the full product is also tested at multiple points (usually with both built in self tests and external automated fixtures or operators). In addition to that, units will get pulled on a sampling basis for much more thorough inspection, usually by people employed or contracted by the OEM separately from the final assembler. In addition to that, field failures are tracked. In all of this, each step is fully traceable down to which individual operators and fixtures went into each assembly and test step. You can be sure that if a supplier is found cheating the spec, they’re not getting business from that OEM again and may have additional damages depending on the contract. YMMV if you’re buying stuff from brands you’ve never heard of from Amazon marketplace sellers, but any major OEM works like this.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

I think you are writing about some past entity which has morphed into something different which has only the brand in common with that past. Or how else do you explain: 4min,45sec youtube video 'Louis opens new Macbook Air, immediately loses mind.'

[1] https://youtu.be/iiCBYAP_Sgg

where said Louis discovers placebo cooling.

This is broken by design. They should apply quality control to their minds, because no amount of that elsewhere can fix that.

[amatecha]

I mean, he doesn't make any genuine effort to actually try to make sense of it. From what I can surmise, the case is presumably "air-tight" except the air ducts along the back edge, and the fan will pull air through the case and over the heatsink. That said, that doesn't necessarily mean it's effective enough, as we can see! hahah :P

[nrp]

You can only dissipate so much heat passively conducted through the surface of the device before the temperature of either the internal components or the surface of the case exceeds what is safe. Getting around that often just means having some amount of forced air to carry heat away. In this case, it's a blower that pulls air in from vents, pulls it over various parts of the cavity (including some amount over that heatsink), and exhausts it out. Given how low the TDP of the CPU in a MacBook Air is, the thermal budget presumably balances.

[winrid]

The fan should draw air over the heatsink right? Also that CPU has a 7.5w TDP. Your phone's cpu probably runs at 5w and has no fan.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

The CPUs in phones have some sort of TIM (thermal interface material) applied to them, and are either in direct contact with the inner side of the case, or a heatpipe which dissipates the heat elsewhere, over a larger area. This does nothing of that. It's just sitting there simmering nicely. The only reason i can think of is that they recycled most of a former model, and then shrank the cpu-board which then didn't reach unter the vent anymore.

But how did they even manage to oversee that during testing?

HOW?

[AFascistWorld]

It all sounds awesome, just like the records kept for every single step of production in that PCB factory, how-to instructions for every single action, I mean it's eye-opening how many records Japanese factories keep, except it was all useless at least in that case and in its intended purpose. Workers would check if the fake data seem reasonable and do faking blitz before inspections. The factory had only one incident in which it paid damages for high frequency interference issues to a Japanese TV maker.

Rebellious middle school drop-out (no offence) workers earning basic income plus 1.5x overtime wages for 12 hours a day 6 days a week won't take any of that seriously, schedule and cost are always of higher priority.

In the story of iWatch, the two groups of independent contractors use their barely working equipment to do seal test, the equipment is so bad that it returns different results even for a same watch part, but hey we gotta make it work, so their tech guy wrote code to always return results that are up to standards.

[baybal2]

> Rebellious middle school drop-out (no offence) workers earning basic income plus 1.5x overtime wages

It's very ironic that when you are going to a higher tier contract manufacturer, you can expect worse results these days.

We often work with small contract manufacturers who very narrowly specialise in high value and low volume runs.

They have very competitive HR policy for good assembly line workers, and are meticulous on work hygiene (like strict 8h shifts, mandatory physical exam, mandatory P.E. and rests.) CNY15000 for a professionally educated assembly line worker with 4-5 years of experience and proof of skills is not a rarity there.

Same with SMT technicians industry wide. Up to date training certificates + 5-7 years of work experience on high end equipment sets CNY15000 as a minimum for a good professional. SMT technicians make higher net salaries in China now than in USA! Totally true, go google it.

You think cost? We don't give a square f* about that when labour on even low volume and poorly mechanised production runs makes less than 10% of product value. Dramatically lower return rates and faster turnovers pay for that like 10 times over.

[jimmaswell]

I don't want to spend money on craftsmanship if it's going to be obsolete in a few years - what good is the most well-crafted 1360x768 30hz monitor in the world today? You can definitely find higher-end products if you seek them out still, anyway. Just find what's recommended on enthusiast forums.