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Comment by roncesvalles | Hacker News Reader

>they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills

It's more complicated than this. Historically, Chinese manufacturing has been notorious for quietly undermining the quality of the product to improve their margins over time, in a way that the commissioning brand doesn't notice. If a Chinese manufacturer quotes you a price too good to be true, they're probably quoting you at-cost and will build in their margin later, once the orders start flowing in.

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People should realize China is huge and manufactures one third of world's goods.

You're going to have excellence and crap across such a gargantuan amount of production and companies, a high amount of variance.

A really good example of this is the luxury watch market. China manufactures a heap of shitty knockoffs. They also manufacture a heap of the high end legitimate brand watches. And they manufacture some nice and obscenely expensive high end luxury watches.

High amount variance of quality is a daily reality and as any chinese consumer we are very used to that since the beginning of e-commerce. However there are multiple aspects to the quality feel. Production of high quality items is one thing (e.g one can do better QA etc), what I heard from some local car garages in China is that standardisation in the industry is still quite poor. E.g Parts to replace and bolts and nuts are not as standardised say as the German counter parts (purely from a mechanics point of view).

Having said that a lot of German car suppliers are in China, and the German car manufacturing industry evolved over a significantly longer period of time.

Also the enforcement of standardization is really poor, almost to the point nobody cares.

Chinese manufacturers can make quality stuff and can be rather honest to work with once you show certain knowledge of the field, they will even tell you which products are to avoid.

"Quality fade".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quality_fade

>Chinese manufacturing has been notorious for quietly undermining the quality of the product to improve their margins over time

Famously Gemtek Technology (https://www.gemteks.com/en/about/about), Apples small obscure modem OEM at the time, when presented with contract to manufacture 1999 AirPort Wifi cards made first batch of complete duds because factory owner saw picofarad smd caps and decided it will be more profitable to for him to GLUE tiny plastic rectangles instead, after all picofarad is like nothing so nobody will tell the difference.

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273798...

Gemtek’s headquarters is established in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Republic of what?

The most infamous example of this is hip implants made in China that had to be recalled due to being made wrong. This is also why Chinese structural steel is rarely used in North America and Europe.

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