This seems to be a constant battle when going the Chinese route. You have to cut open a few from every shipment and check to see if inferior components have been subbed in since last time.
A company called Yongnuo makes some fantastic speedlights (photographic flashes), which are inexpensive alternatives to the fully-automatic Canon/Nikon standards for strobist photogs. Think $40 instead of $400.
The trade-off is that many of them arrive defective, they are known for not having good QA. There are sellers on ebay who make it a point to test every one before shipping. Guess who I chose to buy mine from? Not a bad way to make a profit and stand out on an otherwise low-margin item.
One thought that has occurred to me though is that Apple is using much more poor quality manufacturing than they were years ago, and there is a high failure rate of Apple laptops. However, they have a warranty that covers fixing everything for 1 year and everyone sane knows to buy the extended 3 year since there's something like a 1 in 4 chance you'll need it. So Apple has figured that they save enough making it in China that they can absorb the cost of fixing 25% of the ones where the customer bought AppleCare. These repairs are usually replacing the whole motherboard with spares that they buy in vast quantities for each and every model. This is all done very intentionally for sound economic reasons and customer satisfaction is very high despite the failures.
The easy (but probably wrong) answer would be how western import taxes don't have enough environmental/ethical component in them.
Too bad we can't be bothered, since we must protect corporate profits at any cost.
On top of unit costs there is cost to stock in store, cost of the store's profit, etc. Let me ask you this, would you be willing to pay $10,000 for a computer Made in USA? Is the computer you are working on right now Made in USA, or are some components from China?
That's the answer right there. We can pay $1000 for a Chinese made laptop or $10,000 for an entirely USA made one top to bottom. What market is there for the eco and labor friendly USA one, and what is the chance that a company selling these would stay in business for even 6 months? Is the chance greater than 0%?
edit: oh wait! We'll just dump it in Asia instead! Yay!
(For those dislike any and all criticism of, well, China, a possible solution would be to require that trade partners implement and enforce similar levels of environmental regulations on manufacturing so that international trade is not just "exporting pollution". This is not simple though because China has a habit of fake-certifying things (for example much Chinese-grown "organic" food is organic in certification alone). So to work in reality and not theory, this would involve non-Chinese inspectors throughout the country with full access to inspect things, which would probably not be acceptable to Chinese State officials. In reality, things will continue as they have been going until the oceans can no longer support life, followed by massive extinctions of other animals such as humans and all other species whose ecochains have links relying on healthy ocean functioning to live.)
I'd love that, but you do realize that it would stop 'outsourcing' pretty much dead in its tracks. (not a bad thing by itself).
This will also immediately be reflected in the sticker price of the goods.
It would be awesome to hear more advice or stories, if you have them.
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/
As for me, counterfeit capacitors have no doubt shortened my life by a few years. Hardware is stinking hard. I have mad respect for anyone who sets foot in this domain. Here be dragons.
One friend had to get rubber household cleaning gloves made in China. He worked for a retailer and this would be for their store brand. If they specified something to be done, it would be done exactly the way they wanted. If something was unspecified, you could bet that the cheapest, shoddiest, most dangerous materials/processes would be used. For example, he never specified that the rubber used should actually be safe to be worn by humans. Prototypes came back with obscene levels of toxins in a glove that is meant to protect people from getting their hands dirty with household cleaning chemicals. There was just no common sense to fill in the blanks in the instructions here. Once they sorted out this issue, as another commenter mentioned, they would have to check each and every shipment because the manufacturer would try to sneak cheaper variants into the batches. Eventually my friend went and inspected the factory on a business trip only to find so many ethically questionable practices that he eventually decided to switch to another job.
If you choose to go the overseas route, I'd suggest that you find a consultant who has experience here. It will be well worth it. They'll be familiar with all the games that are played and will save you money.
As a westerner enjoying the luxuries of a western lifestyle, obviously I'd urge you to try to source/assemble locally. Cheap labour practices aside (i.e. I understand the argument that folks on that side of the world need work too and are willing to put up with cheap wages and long hours), a lot of the savings come from a complete disregard for the local environment. So these workers might benefit from the wages they earn, but they'll pay for it with their health. You probably wouldn't want heavy metals leeching into your community's drinking water, and you'd cease doing business with a factory doing so in your neck of the woods. But somehow folks seem to think it's acceptable if it's not in their backyard. That's an ethical question you'll have to answer for yourself.
All this said, quite frankly some of the manufacturing expertise simply no longer exists in North America. So your only choice is to get stuff done in China. I know a wealthy flag-waving patriotic ex-military businessman who confided in me as much about why he had to outsource overseas. He said it wasn't so much the cost but that the manufacturers overseas were simply better skilled. We like to think we've got superior technology/processes over here and that the only advantage of overseas manufacturing is the cheap price. But the more that manufacturing is done overseas, the less this will be true.
EDIT: The particular reason I'd love to hear a post-mortem on this is because I work for a mega-corp that is supposed to have the process to prevent such a mistake. Although all of our hardware undergoes both design testing and factory acceptance testing, we still manage to miss our share of mistakes. I would love to hear what WM thinks they missed.
is the savings really worth it? and how can one tell that they aren't getting scammed? seems like win-win for chinese companies to cut all possible corners. either they'll save a buck or they'll get caught and just have to get paid to make more.