Japanese ink supplier Seiko Advance produces colors for Apple’s iPhones | Hacker News Reader

Japanese ink supplier Seiko Advance produces colors for Apple’s iPhones

asia.nikkei.com

135 pointsMrJagil54 comments

Despite the apparent similarity in English, and that they both now use the kanakana セイコー in their official names, it appears that this Seiko (正興, "revive justice") has nothing to do with the far larger Seiko (精工, "qualify craft") group of watches, Epson printers etc fame.

http://www.seikoadvance.co.jp/company/profile.php

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiko#History_and_development

I wish western companies could have names that cool.

I think western companies avoid them because they seem like little-company names. I see a lot of small businesses named “Quality Plumbing”, “First Rate Contractors” etc. But if they do well, they’ll change their names to “Plumbz” and “Cment” (you’ll be shocked to learn I’m not a marketing expert), or no one will trust them outside their home town.

Note that this wasn’t always so: Standard Oil, International Business Machines, General Electric, Atlantic Telephone and Telegraph were branded quite differently.

On a related note, the Mitsubishi Group is a huge conglomerate that makes everything from cars to fighter jets to nuclear plants. Mitsubishi pens also dominate the stationery market, and I just assumed that it was part of the group. But it turns out the pen maker is actually unrelated to the conglomerate[0].

To add to the confusion, both the pen maker and the conglomerate have identical English names, Japanese kanjis, and even share the same three-red-diamonds logo.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni-ball

At some point, the company was renamed from Masaki to Mitsubishi, and the logo similarity can’t be an accident. They may not be officially related, but there’s almost certainly an interesting history between the two companies.

It’s likely a similar story to Mitsui, where it’s actually just a huge family and people use their name to increase trust.

EDIT: turns out both companies came to this logo independently. The pen company got to it first, and the Mitsubishi Group and the pen company decided to allow mutual usage due to non-competing business areas.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B9%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3...

^ here’s some more info for Japanese speakers. Basically both companies derived their logo from various family crests and it’s a pretty common shape so it ended up like this

Mitsubishi also manufacture money — on your behalf — as the recursively acronymed “MUFG Bank”[1,2,3,4].

// If you think it would be fascinating leading modern software engineering within this remarkable amalgamation, drop me a note.

1. MUFG Americas origin: https://mufgamericas.com/who-we-are/our-history

2. MUFG Bank origin: https://www.bk.mufg.jp/global/aboutus/origins/index.html

3. UnionBank reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUFG_Union_Bank

4. MUFG (M-UFJ-FG) reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_UFJ_Financial_Group

However, their Chinese subsidiaries are also called "精工“, which is identical to the watch company. Their history page says it was renamed from 正興 to Seiko Advance in 1950.

http://www.seikoadvance.co.jp/en/company/profile.php http://www.seikoadvance.co.jp/cn/company/profile.php

An interesting topic for Tim Cook to tweet about. Perhaps he’s trying to emphasize their use of non-Chinese companies in their manufacturing process?

Sometimes a "public reference" is part of an enterprise's contractual negotiation. They can then use this (Tim Cook's visit + quote) to garner future sales.

Tim Cook is a very private person, and he puts a lot of work into maintaining his public persona. Every word that he says publicly is vetted and checked to make sure that it aligns with his and Apple’s position on whatever the relevant topics might be. I doubt that a small supplier in Japan would make them reconsider that policy.

What makes you think such a contractually agreed upon tweet wouldn't be "vetted and checked"?

I’m saying that Tim Cook doesn’t just tweet things because a small supplier tells him to. It’s because it’s something nice that fits in with what Apple would like to say on a certain topic.

Suppose the small supplier is supplying 'something nice that fits in with what Apple would like to say on a certain topic.'

Uhhhhh... no.

Having worked with Apple in Japan directly (not just engineering related work, but having worked with former Apple Japan execs), I can tell you that the relationships they hold with companies over there are valued internally. It's part of the culture, for better or for worse.

I can't state for certain whether it matters in the context of Cook's Tweet, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest either. Don't be so quick to cast it aside. ;P

Of course they are, I’m not saying they’re not. But that doesn’t mean Tim Cook doesn’t have a reason behind his tweets. (Note that I’m not saying this is a bad thing; it’s just that if they have anything to do with Apple they always align with something that the company would like to comment on, be it education or the environment or immigration policy.)

I see no reason a tweet like that couldn't be a mutually beneficial one. Seiko gets the shout-out and in exchange apple gets a better deal and also telegraphs a little tidbit that shows thought and quality that go into Apple products.

This doesn't conflict with what I said. A public reference is something he can approve, and sure, he can tweet his own words.

More likely the combination of authenticity, originality, and especially the “green” credentials. All the ink Mitsubishi provides is eco-friendly, and they have plans to go full-renewable for their energy needs in the next couple of years.

Mark Carney yesterday almost intimated companies to get out of fossil fuels. Thurnberg’s books are everywhere. The switch to eco-friendly modes of production and consumption is likely to be the big issue of the next decade.

I love mittlestand companies like this. Global, highly specialized, and all about product quality and customer service.

Thanks for the TIL word!

And of course it's a german word. These companies are the strength of the german industry !

And the driving force of capitalism, megacorps only represent about 1% of companies and ~20% of employment (minimum wage jobs are also a very small percentage of all jobs despite the constant attention it gets).

SMB are the real business world and where the majority of upward mobility is. Sadly most critiques of markets are hyper focused on the mega corps and policy gets made which only considers the big bad guys, which squeezes out the smaller firms as side effects of otherwise well intentioned policy.

The rate of people starting new businesses has been declining lately and it’s concerning. Megacorps dominating absolutely everything is a big part of dystopian fiction for a good reason.

I agree, but part of the reason is that such small businesses consistently fail to differentiate their policy objectives from the ones of megacorps. If I give a tax breaks to companies, megacorps will benefit disproportionately more than SMBs, but SMBs oppose thresholds and caps because they “discourage growth” and “increase red tape”. What is a legislator going to do?

SMBs in many ways act as “temporarily embarrassed megacorps” and hence reap what they sow.

what small business is all about

not sure about the US, but in Europe these companies often grow into having a couple of hundred employees, at which point they just continue being at the top in their niche without much growth. sometimes they get absorbed, often not because what they do doesn't provide a lot of synergies with what big corp. are doing.

If you want the 101 of Mittelstand read the book Hidden Champions by Hermann Simon. A little dated but still relevant and a great read.

shouldn't this be "jittlestand" as mittlestand implies German businesses? Brittlestand is analogous term for British businesses.

There are a lot of these small suppliers around the world no one really knows about.

A former boss of mine had a side business making blade balancing weights for helicopters. He would take a few weeks every few years to make a big batch then ship them over. I found it surprising at the time that a one-man show made the blade balance weights for 1/4 of all the helicopters in the world as a part-time gig in the middle of nowhere. Just goes to show there are still plenty of niches out there if you can find them.

I believe there is a similar story about a man who made window seals for planes.

Link to the tweet from Tim Cook:

https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1204212048139182080

As a consumer-products company, color is something Apple has long been obsessed about. The highlight of Steve Jobs' intro of the multi-color iMac G3 in 1999 was his comment about their colors: "Don't you just wanna lick 'em?" (IIRC). See also, from 6 years ago: https://www.cultofmac.com/243579/how-apples-design-team-choo...

Sometimes it baffles me, the amount of sound and fury regarding the rose gold iPhone etc. For me it’s a utilitarian device but I know it’s not that for everyone.

Although the article itself refers to the substance as ink, it’s usually called coating(s).

Could it be called an ink coating? My understanding is that the distinction between ink and pigment is that ink is a solution while pigment is a suspension, can there be both kinds of coatings? or is it a meaningless distinction to draw in this context?

Sorry to barrage you with these questions if you don't know, but you brought up a pretty fine point so you seem knowledgeable about this :)

I'm no expert but in industry (and it may differ from company to company) coatings is mostly paints and inks are separate. Inks usually permeate (and add coloration to) a medium while coatings/paints bind and coat (to) a medium.

Anodized aluminum forms a porous surface that is dyed with ink to colour it, if I recall correctly.

Is that olive drab, like the military uses?

It's actually a really nice greyish-green colour. Not as drab as you'd think thanks to the way light diffuses through the glass

With the dark green case, it has a VERY strong Newton MessagePad vibe which I love (having been a very happy Newton user during its twilight years.)

So I guess bike-shedding has now become mainstream, seeing that the CEO of the second-largest company on the planet has mentioned the color of one of his company's products as a thing to be amazed about.

Well, if it really is that hard to produce a green ink that doesn't involve harsh materials, or if Apple is spending extra to use such an ink over the cheaper nastier inks, then it's notable and something worth bragging about and putting on the tin.

Does this new color cost extra? Or are they subsidizing a higher cost across all sales?

No, they charge the same price for all colors. Frankly the only products I’ve seen with different prices for different colors is autos.

There were also black MacBooks.

In some years they do differentiate so some color is only available on the expensive models.

I think the RED editions were slightly more expensive, if i remember correctly.

One person's "bike-shedding" is another person's "actually giving a shit instead of participating in a lowest-possible-quality race-to-the-bottom".

Tim simply tweeted about a relatively minor aspect of iPhone production, which isn't what "bike-shedding"[1] means.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

a company known for making billions out of the stylishness of their products, it's bikeshedding, really are you sure?

Bike-shedding is effort wasted on things that are irrelevant, like if an electronics startup paid this much attention to color. In Apple’s position as a fashion company as much as a tech company, and at Apple’s scale, they can and do invest hundreds of people’s time in making sure that the paint jobs are as good as they can get them.

I was still looking at Apple as mainly a tech company, the “style” thing I reguarded as a distraction. We’ll see if they’re be able to keep their current valuation by ignoring their tech roots. And yes, I am bitter because just the other day an iPhone of our family experienced the infamous “white screen of death” for not having sufficient storage space left (it happened on a restart), the phone is one-year old. I hadn’t seen such low quality in a mass-produced OS since the days of Windows Me and Windows 2000.

> Windows 2000

I urge you to reconsider.

That was the last OS I used for which the acceptable troubleshooting solution was to “format the disk”. 20 years later and I came to the same point with this iPhone 7, thought that we had left that behind us. And I can’t even do it myself, I have to wait for the local Apple service store to open, which it won’t until January 6th (the phone broke down on December 27th). But hurray! for the new color, I guess.

The original bike shed was at the gate of a nuclear power plant.

In the anecdote, the “board” spent its time debating what color to paint it because that was something they understood, as opposed to safety coolant system engineering, for instance.

Given the original anecdote, perhaps it’s less that the thing is not relevant, more that (a) it’s not the critical thing to worry about, and (b) it’s getting discussed because that’s all the decision makers are familiar enough with to debate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com