[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