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Comment by aaronbieber | Hacker News Reader

It stood out to me that the author of the post is the COO at a meditation service start-up, not a manufacturing one... Unless Ten Percent Happier is making physical products that I'm unaware of.

I think this guy was just musing about Apple's quality and has watched a lot of AvE and This Old Tony on YouTube and wanted to share his opinions with the world. They're not all entirely correct.

For anyone who wants to go on the whole manufacturing journey, don't miss the Linus Tech Tips video about why their screwdriver took 3 years to bring to market (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K5Gqp1cEcM). And they based their design on a fully functional production-ready screwdriver, they did not start from scratch.

Going from idea to production is really, really hard. Even today, even with CNC and 3D printing and other prototyping tools. Even with all the money LTT has to spend on it (millions of dollars, as I understand it).

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> It stood out to me that the author of the post is the COO at a meditation service start-up, not a manufacturing one... Unless Ten Percent Happier is making physical products that I'm unaware of.

The guy started bolt.io. A VC for hardware based startups and got $100 million funding. So I think he knows a thing or two about manufacturing.

He knows a thing or two about getting money to fund hardware start-ups. Which is something different.

The assumption that the people that get growth-hungry “investors” to splash the cash in a cheap-money environment is what makes this a cycle.

To give him the benefit of the doubt, he seems to be writing to people wanting to make small electronic gadgets. You can't sell something for $19.99 retail that requires a lot of hands-on time.

At a quick scan, Bolt.IO includes "Carbon Robotics - Building intelligent robots for agriculture-related applications", "Denizen - Personal prefab offices...", and "Spyce - An original restaurant concept featuring a robotic kitchen that cooks and serves delicious meals". I guarantee those robots, office furniture, and kitchens contain CNCed parts, if not hand-fitted parts.

On the other hand, he also wrote "What happened when Apple wanted to CNC machine a million MacBook bodies a year? They bought 10k CNC machines to do it." If a CNC machine can't make more than one piece every 3.5 days, you're either building aircraft or you're doing it wrong.

>I think this guy was just musing about Apple's quality and has watched a lot of AvE and This Old Tony on YouTube and wanted to share his opinions with the world. They're not all entirely correct.

IDK what the author's qualifications are but the ones you list would make him at least as qualified as whoever's "simple but wrong" take on a problem is thrice guided on Reddit or at the top of HN at any particular minute.

The reality is that if you wanna write "popular" context you gotta cater to a low common denominator, maybe not the lowest but you will have to stare deep into the abyss of ignorance and hubris to find it. A nuanced take that will pass the muster of a subject matter grey beard is going to be too nuanced, too informed by 1st/2nd hand experience and physical reality to resonate with the hordes of casual readers it needs to resonate with in order to gain any traction. Regardless of the qualifications of the author the content MUST be dumbed down to the point of being useless to anyone with the problems discussed therein in order to resonate with the audience it needs to resonate with for it to gain enough traction for us to be talking about it here (and frankly it's a lot easier to write that kind of resonating content from within the abyss than looking in above it).

I'm not really in the mood to write a sufficiently internet-nitpicker-proof wall of text but this sort of content where people opine on things of which their depth of knowledge is only a hair deeper than that of the casual or create content from that perspective despite being smarter than that is highly, highly incentivized by how we have set up the platforms and information flows that control where/how entertainment content (like a blog article or a video) gets dolled out to people seeking to consume such content.

The partially blind leading the blind then?

The legally blind leading the blind in practice.

You need experience, and hands-on approach.

"3 years, and millions of dollars" — is very typical when you keep going from factory, to factory, leaving tooling investment every time they screw up.

Instead, you have to pick at least a sane, and understanding factory owner, and wait for them to improve.

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