Are Levi's from Amazon different from Levi's from Levi's?

Apple is willing to pay the cost to minimize the margin-of-error at every step.

Another approach to keeping yield high (at the possible risk of hurting your brand) is to do what Intel did with their Celeron line. The equivalent for Apple would be a "value iPhone" which would not come with the same set of expectations from customers.

As for the Xbox controllers, it could be a lot of differences. Microsoft does not feel the need to keep different runs exactly the same. They may be more willing to buy different types of plastic depending on what's cheapest this quarter.

Or it could be much simpler, maybe iPhones do feel different. How much time do you actually spend interacting with someone else's phone (Have you ever even actually touched another person's phone, or just their case?), vs how much time did you spend with your buddy's Xbox controllers?

It probably wouldn't be if human beings had to drill holes in the PCB by hand, place and solder components by hand, and hand-machine the case.

different from my friend’s Xbox controllers even though they were the same model and supposedly manufactured the same.

This could be things like slight changes in the sourcing of, say, springs for an analog stick, composition of rubber used under other buttons, and actual wear on components of the assembly line, like the molds used for injection molding of something with a pebble texture. Not to mention, obviously, that each controller will break down differently over time depending on use.

Hard materials are easier than soft materials in some ways. If you lay a soft fabric out before cutting, is it slightly folded, perfectly flat, taut? It will all make a difference.

Moulding plastic or cutting a hard material like aluminium is more amenable to tight tolerances since you can use the same mould over and over, use the same cutter and the material doesn't flex, stretch or change in any significant way.

Coding is 100% an engineering endeavor. And just like any other one, a particular project may not be following engineering best practices and that project may be producing some dangerous garbage as a result, but I'm actually fairly satisfied with my engineering practices, as engineering practices, what with my automated testing, automated acceptance criteria, automated security checking, automated style checking, integrated peer-review practices, performance testing practices, engineering for redundancy and resiliance. If $YOU're thinking the coding world is awfully cowboy maybe that's a sign that $YOU need to up your game with the already-existing and well-documented best practices in our industry. To be honest most other "real engineers" would be green with envy at what we have available to us!

Latency is the first to come to mind. The realities of how systems are designed and how permanent the storage in question is translate to latency and thus frequently performance bottlenecks.

Data durability is another thing to consider. Though frequently that's mostly abstracted away in the lower layers of hardware, system composition, and operating system / file system / libraries generally.

Limitations also exist in raw hardware performance (state machine speed, how parallel the computation can be, how parallel the desired process can be made) and capacity, for processing, temporary memory (RAM), and long term storage. Thermal considerations might also be a factor, but those are usually managed by lower layers and present as capacity limitations to typical software.

Software as a domain for achieving goals does offer an unusually wide degree of flexibility in approach. Today we also stand on the shoulders of many giants, with relatively easy access to extremely powerful systems that can obscure many sins for 'reasonable' workloads.

And I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the very article you linked to clearly states it has nothing to do with returns. Rather:

> Many vendors choose to house their products in Amazon’s vast warehouses. But the longer the goods remain unsold, the more a company is charged to store them. It is eventually cheaper to dispose of the goods, especially stock from overseas, than to continue storing the stock.

It is about vendors who remove their merchandise from stock because nobody will buy it.

And what are you talking about "shoddy trousers"? It's a pair of Levi's. Why wouldn't they resell them? They already sell them in the first place. It's profit. Amazon isn't exactly in the business of not making profit.

The brands I typically wear are Izod, RL Chaps, US Polo(not RL Polo), and lately some from Kingsize. The latter fit nicely but I find a lot of styles a bit wonky or dated.

Still, I rarely wear those for that reason. They also look like crap at the end of the day from sitting in cars or padded chairs.

- Are you comparing unpublished personal journaling with professional published journalism?

- Are you saying a comparison garment sample of 2 for a single cohort has merit?

Governments exist to maintain a commons in the tragedy of the commons.

The market, as well as societal trust, is a commons. People in power make individuals responsible for the commons, which creates a collective action problem, which creates a structural incapability of addressing what is best for everyone, such as being able to trust merchants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem