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How Much Are You Paying For A Nameplate?
Matey-O writes: "I realize most of you built your systems youself (with mad overclocking style) but if you've purchased a fully built system receintly from Compaq, Dell, HP or Apple, you may have a computer built by Quanta, a very quiet, very successful Taiwanese manufacturing company. NY times article here." (This is true at least of notebooks.)
I used to build systems for friends and family by going to the computer shows. The downside was always having to support software issues, but I iused to make some good cash from it.
I now turn them away and tell them to buy from Gateway or Dell instead - a Gateway can be had now for as little as 600.00 US complete. My profit margin would be very slim having to build it myself.
The only downside I see is that the namebrands tend to have some hardware issues if you try to change the OS from whatever they ship with. Seems as if the sound card/ video card is proprietary in some fasion, and even switching from the Millenium OS to Win 98 can be a chore since the manufacturers don't supply drivers for the other equiptment.
The upside is, I can refer them to name brand tech support and go back to gaming instead of sitting on a phone for 2 hours fixing a Microsoft bug.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
You are looking at the future of manufacturing. This business model is growing incredibly fast. To see why look at the XBox process. MS decided they wanted a piece of the console pie, so they got together with a firm that specializes in high tech manufacturing. MS is a company designed around producing software, that is what they do most efficiently. They know that they will not be able to build and run physical factories with the efficiency of a manufacturing company. These specialized manufacturers are amazing. I read in Wired about how the company doing the XBox was in on the design process and they were cutting costs and production times left and right from MS's original design. I understand that the Mexican plant they are using has trucks coming with parts and leaving with product every five mins. and planes taking off and landing at an airport (which they negotiated to be build) every 15 to 20 mins. That's a degree of efficiency MS could never reach. Simply businesses are specializing more to reach peak economic efficacy. BTW Sorry for the terrible structure of this paragraph, I'm at work.. Not much time.
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No registration here either, nor is it "cheating".
Funnily enough, the last time I checked with my IS guys, I could put together two complete no-brand systems for what they pay for a full Dell system + support. Given that I spend a lot of time compiling, having two boxen would be a positive benefit. I have the desk space, I have the inclination, and I think we can live with the electricity bill. Worst case, a component fails and I end up with one machine plus a box of spares, with a zero second turnaround, never mind one day.
I suggested this, and got the usual answer: we buy standard Dell boxen because it removes support and maintenance issues.
That sounds fair enough until you consider that I receive exactly zero support for the problems that I have on my machine. We're an R&D shop, and taking risks and pushing things until they go wrong is pretty much what we do for a living. What the IS guys really mean is: nobody ever got fired for buying Dell (/IBM/Microsoft).
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Manufacturing outsourcing happens everywhere, not just in tech. Sure, electronics is a big business (that's why the Flextronics of the world do so well), and laptops are particularly ripe for outsourced manufacture, but other industries have products made for them.
The best comparable example I can give is the auto industry. Many car makers have alliances with one another - erstwhile competitors make each other's cars, sometimes in a straight re-badging, other times in a joint assembly line. here's a few "for instances":
Toyota jointly owns a plant with GM. It makes both the Toyota Corolla and the Chevy Prism. They're the same car with different trim. One factory, one car, two companies. Joint ownership.
Honda had no SUV on the boards when the SUV craze struck America, so they came up with the Honda Passport. It's an Isuzu Rodeo with a Honda badge. It's made in Isuzu's factory, and sold by Honda. A straight outsourcing deal.
Ford owns a great deal of Mazda (I'm not sure if they have full control or not). The Escort and Protege were identical - and the Mazda Navajo was just a Ford Explorer Sport. This is an example of two interlocked companies filling out their line together.
When tech manufacture is outsourced, the brand-name company can worry about the design, the feature set, and all the marketing. The manufacturer can worry about actually doing what's possible, and squeezing every possible cent of cost out of the build process. The marketing company then doesn't have to worry about owning expensive factories that depreciate, and the manufacturer can concentrate on building better, faster, and cheaper - with a variety of customers and products that avoids idle plants and workers as best as possible.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Got my laptop from Higrade, a UK based reseller of Asus boxes. Asus are well known for the mobos, but less so for their fully assembled products. Take a good look at the specs for the Higrade Notino 2200 (an Asus machine underneath). Basically, the spec is for a PC equivalent of an iBook, at a really competitive price.
Lines like this One of those clients, Dell, has prodded Quanta to move more of its production to mainland China, where labor and other costs are much lower. in the article are pretty worrying. Anyone who has read "No Logo" by Naomi Klein will tell you that the outsourcing of piecework like this to countries with bad human rights records increases the problem of sweatshop labour.
China in particular has a bad reputation for this sort of thing, abusing both its own people and those of nearby countries that it lays claim to (Tibet for instance). Companies like Quanta in the article are the "acceptable face" of this work. They hire subcontractors who in turn hire their own subcontractors, hiding the problem from their parent companies. However if Dell are asking Quanta to move production to China, I would speculate that they almost definitely know what the end result will be.
A little planning goes a long way...