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I agree, and want to reiterate from slightly different angles. It drives me crazy to hear people say, "Is that made in China? Because I won't buy cheap Chinese crap!" Are they happy to buy "crap" from elsewhere? The implied causation between Chinese and "crap" is just not there. There has historically been a correlation, but so many people have made the leap to causation in their heads. The vast majority of Apple's products have been made in China over the last couple of decades. It's easy to question some of Apple's design trade-offs (e.g., gluing batteries in to make things a fraction of a mm thinner), but those tradeoffs are part of the "designed in Cupertino" that is stamped on their products. The fit and finish is much harder to question, and that is done by Chinese hands. It's excellent because Apple, and Apple's customers, are willing to pay for that. Chinese manufacturers have proven they are excellent at building to whatever price / quality tradeoff their customers demand. For goods sold in the US, it's US companies and/or US consumers setting the price / quality tradeoff. To the extent there is a correlation, it comes from China being able to build to the cheaper, and therefore crappier, standards that consumers want. When China loses that edge (as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan did before them), they will move further upmarket and others will step in to fill that market need (Vietnam? India? Various African countries?). This cycle keeps repeating... one of the funnest parts of watching "Back to the Future" today is that the line "all the best stuff is made in Japan" went from sounding so unlikely in the 1980s to prescient in the 21st century. And that line makes no sense to young people, whose experience is that the "best stuff" has always been made in Japan. |