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Comment by mediaman | Hacker News Reader

Lenovo is probably doing this for a few reasons:

* The corporate market often prioritizes speed and ease of doing business over the absolute rock-bottom cost. Local manufacturing offers advantages due to a much shortened supply chain.

* The gap between an hourly worker's wages in the US versus China is shrinking, due to Chinese labor inflation and US collar wage stagnation.

* The hours of labor per assembled unit is declining due to advances in automation, rendering regional labor variances less important.

Labor is becoming less of an issue while local manufacturing continues to have major supply chain cost benefits, so Lenovo considers that the scales have tipped enough to justify a US presence for the market segment that values that responsiveness the most.

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Yes, higher oil prices are starting to affect profit margins, the cost of shipping a 40 foot container has tripled since the 2000s. Shipping finished products is getting more expensive.

Lead times are also very important, it takes about a month to get something from china to the US. This means that you need higher inventory levels in order to be able satisfy the demand without considerable shortages.

When you take into account the variety of configurations available its very hard not to get low rotation items on your inventory. Specially if you are expected to always have stock and when your inventory levels have to consider that it takes a month to get an item to the US.

Shifting assembly to the US reduces the number of SKUs imported and allows an easier control over inventory levels and supply chain costs.

BTW when you order a Thinkpad from their website and customize it then it is shipped from China using UPS and spends almost a day in Alaska going through customs. Shipping is "free" but of course you are paying for it.

Except when Lenovo forgets the paperwork and it spends a week in impound before somebody notices...

Lenovo just has too many choices (technical term for this condition is SKUs up the butt). A T430 can be configured with one of 7(!) CPUs, some Sandy Bridge and some Ivy Bridge. There are two pairs of CPUs that cost the same. There are four wifi choices, even though the most expensive is only $40 (and is actually available 3rd party for ~$17 on ebay). Lenovo should just always stick the good one in there, and either eat the cost or bump the base price. Whenever Apple offers an option with two choices, Lenovo offers it with six choices, and then there's twice as many options on top of that.

I honestly like having 7 choices for which CPU I want in a computer. It's the main reason I chose Lenovo over Dell for my most recent computer.

Just because Apple sells items with a few options doesn't mean every other company should.

> Lenovo should just always stick the good one in there

I'm sympathetic to this argument - there's always the oddball page in the configuration process that doesn't make sense, like the not-actually-selectable "Selectable SIM" on the current page for the T430. But the number of choices that actually don't make sense isn't that high, and the wifi adapter is not a good example. Which is "the good one"? The one with a working driver for someone's oddball OS, or the one with 802.11a support for someone's legacy network?

Do you think Lenovo should do away with one of the two palmrest combinations on the T430, and if so, which one, the one with the fingerprint reader or the one without?

Considering all the wifi adapters use the same driver and all of them support 802.11a, I'd say the best one is the one with 3 antennas, instead of 2 antennas or 1.

Can you point me to the information that specifies whether the 'ThinkPad 1x1 b/g/n' adapter supports 802.11a or the 5 GHz band, and uses the same chipset as the Intel Centrino adapters? I honestly tried looking and couldn't find any confirmation.

Ah. Sorry I was hasty, some don't support a. All the more reason to include the good one. :) I believe all the intel chips are essentially identical driver wise, but dunno about the unlabeled one. Then again, I would not be picking the unlabeled mystery chip if I were concerned about drivers.

> Then again, I would not be picking the unlabeled mystery chip if I were concerned about drivers.

You would if you knew what the chip was from sources other than the ordering page. Owning a model already is an obvious example but if I wasn't so lazy I could probably dig up the model spec book, grab the FRU of the card and google up the specs based on that.

Given that most components the computer will be made from are going to be made in China, wouldn't the supply chain cost benefits favor final assembly in China?

I'd be more worried about the "Custom" PC aspect on your supply chain.

Because of the variability in demand, you are either going to expend resources on keeping a large inventory, or you are going to be ordering in smaller batches from suppliers who are a week to two weeks away.

> The gap between an hourly worker's wages in the US versus China is shrinking, due to Chinese labor inflation and US collar wage stagnation.

The system works!

> The gap between an hourly worker's wages in the US versus China is shrinking, due to Chinese labor inflation and US collar wage stagnation.

And people say Americans don't need unions anymore.

Unionization is the wrong response to increasing manufacturing efficiency. The correct response is finding something else to do, with the help of subsidized retraining and education, if you prefer.

How does increasing manufacturing efficiency lead to low hourly pay for the workers? That doesn't make sense. I'd expect fewer workers, but higher hourly pay.

Increased efficiency leads to lower demand for unskilled labor, which will deflate wages so long as supply is greater than demand.

>Unionization is the wrong response to increasing manufacturing efficiency. The correct response is finding something else to do, with the help of subsidized retraining and education, if you prefer.

Only it's not "increasing manufacturing efficiency", it's taking advantage of worldwide labour supply (including child labor and labor under extreme exploitative conditions) _in addition_ to all-too liberal outsourcing and import laws to make wages enter a race for the bottom.

I'll take unionization.

Before outsourcing and offshoring everyone was afraid robots would take their jobs (they did). Personally, I care about a Chinese or Indian family's quality of life equally as much as I care about a local family. Manufacturing jobs allow them to rise above subsistence farming. I'd rather make it so they can skip the whole ugliness the western world went through during its industrialization, but that seems unlikely.

Since there are safety nets in most first world countries, I'll take globalization over unionization as the best way to improve global standards of living over time.

>Before outsourcing and offshoring everyone was afraid robots would take their jobs (they did). Personally, I care about a Chinese or Indian family's quality of life equally as much as I care about a local family.

If we really cared about those people, why allow their wages to be lower and their working conditions be far worse than ours? Just because we can, or because it's better than the alternative (substinence farming)? Well, and slavery is better than famine, should we take advantage of African countries with food/water supply problems to have them work for next to nothing?

The truth is, we "care" about them as long as they keep producing cheap stuff. We care about the cheap stuff. If they wanted equal pay, we could not care less about their fate.

As will happen, eventually, the industry people will jump to the next country that happens to offer them lower wages in a comfortable business environment, e.g Latin America or Africa. Like they moved from the US to China in the first place, crushing US working/middle class in the process.

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