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China to Be Laptop Leader
prostoalex writes "IMS Research says that by the end of the year People Republic of China might become world's biggest laptop manufacturer. The plants will be largely owned by Taiwanese manufacturers, though. Taiwan is current #1."
Help! I'm trapped inside a laptop factory!
Frequency of stories about Chinese tech stuff certainly picked up recently. What's going on there?
The leadership we're talking about here is production only. I don't see how having more low wage workers to exploit equates to development leadership. I don't mean to use the word "exploit" too negatively though, this will probably be a good thing.
The more low-paid jobs available, the more competition for labour, and as a result, better working conditions and pay.
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
Ya Think China might make laptops cheap? And make many of them? Thats NEWS HOW?
Course I want them for 99 cents like everything else I would buy from china.....
I think that we all know that mainland China manufactures a lot of stuff, but what does this prove? That cheap labor attracts business? It comes to me not as any suprise that this was eventually going to happen. A major leap forward would be that China has the most laptop users in the world or possibly that a Chinese computer company has outsold one of western counterparts, but this is really no big suprise.
.. But I welcome our Chineese Laptop overlords.
This is what people used to say about Taiwan, and before Taiwan, Japan.
Now, Taiwan is responsible for producing a number of Apple's computers. They also supply memory to computer manufacturers all over the world.
Japan started out life by creating second-rate consumer goods like watches and cameras. While their watches haven't improved that much (j/k), Nikon et al produce some of the best cameras you can buy. Not that it was always like that. And what about Honda/Toyota, etc? When they first came out, those were the cars you bought when you'd just been declared bankrupt. Now, they're some of the most reliable cars you can buy; Japan pushed the just-in-time production model and numerous other innovations, and their automotive industry is one of the most vibrant in the world.
And so it will be with China. So while now you might say how crap they are, there's a US $100bn per year trade deficit between the US and China in China's favour (I think that figure is correct), and all that money will continue to go towards making China the new Japan.
-- james
I [don't yet] see [too] many "Made in China" laptops at the stores here in Canada.
That's beacuse companies don't like to advertise that fact. Companies often outsource their production; and as long as they do some basic testing, who will know the difference?
I don't know if this is still the case, but at one point IBM was outsourcing the production of its low-end laptops to Acer; Acer is one of the companies investing in mainland China.
IBM laptops aren't going to be labelled "Made in China" any time soon, but they could certainly have been made there.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
>IMS Research says that by the end of the year People Republic of China
>might become world's biggest laptop manufacturer. The plants
>will be largely owned by Taiwanese manufacturers, though.
>Taiwan is current #1.
The problem with business man in general is that they drift where the money is, and care less about the impact to their own country (if they even consider Taiwan to be a country in the first place, regardless if they were born there).
The impact to the shift of labtop industry from Taiwan to China (by Taiwanese company) are two folds.
First, China gains a competitive edge to the industry, and to the overall economy of China and can later be used to bargain against Taiwan. (Heck, China already is using the new found money from its booming economy to buy 3rd world nations' support against Taiwan)
Second, Taiwan loses leadership in the industry, the economy suffers, unemplyeement rate increases due to the moving of manufacturing plants to China.
Most Taiwanese people still fail to realize that China is still a hostile nation towards Taiwan. And China still threaten to invade or bomb Taiwan if Taiwan refused to reunite with China.
God.. I mean... can you imagine American business man supporting Iraq so that Iraq has more money to build missles to aim at US ??
"Personally, I won't be getting one of these laptops from China"
Actually, all of Apple's notebooks are made in Taiwan by "Quanta Computer Inc." and "Eslitegroup Computer System". They may very well soon be made in China, if it is cheaper to produce them there.
Apple may represent "quality" to many people, but the reality is that the're made by the same companies as every other computer. The chips are made by Motorola/IBM/TSMC (vs. AMD/Intel/TSMC for PCs), and the drives/LCD screens/keyboards/cases are likely made by the same corporations.
I doubt Stallman would consider The People's Republic of China a TRUE socialist country. But anyways. Why does it matter that they use it? Are you saying because something can be used in a "bad" way such as you described we shouldn't do it in the first place? And about Microsoft being able to shutdown XP remotely. Would that really matter in a war? Would shutting down ALL their computers damage the millitary that much?
Sock puppets stole my sig.
ODM links
I think Apple powerbooks are now made by Compal.
And that's how it works! Eventually the amount of money China makes from the "cheap junk" (btw, I would hardly call RAM from Taiwan "cheap junk") will raise the standard of living, education and level of innovation. Suddenly, the "cheap junk" China turns out won't be cheap or junky any more. Wages will go up, and quality of goods will go up - and with it, the prices of the goods. A hole will open for another poor country to start producing the "cheap junk".
China is already on the road out of "cheapness". Did you know that a very large selection of the good "English" hi-fi equipment is now made in China? The quality of these components is quite high, too.
Taiwan is on the road to be at a Japanese-level manufacturer, and China is on the road to be a Taiwanese-level manufacturer.
And, in case you hadn't guessed by now, this is all basic economics - otherwise known as the Trickle Down Theory.
-- james
This just in: They make stuff in China.
Stay tuned for these other breaking developments...
- Scientists discover it's really cold in Siberia.
- U.S. Justice Department admits life not fair.
- FDA Bombshell: Eating too much can make you fat.
all this and Andy Rooney, tonight on 60 minutes.
Why do you think the US is so keen on coercing the world's nations into signing onto the WTO treaty? In the case of china, who has the power? The US, who buys all those goods? Or china, who supplies all those cheap goods the people of the US depends on?
China has a large and well educated population that is increasingly moving toward High Tech items, because other countires (such as Taiwan) have traditionally dominated these markets and have kept pries rather high. Using cheaper (criminally, but that's editorializing) labor they can bring to market a cheaper product (of similar quality). Heck, even software jobs are moving to south east Asia and the Indian subcontinent, in an airing of Talk of the Nation a few weeks ago, they were discussing the high levels of education and low cost of workers for fields from mechanical engineering, to software design and tech support in foreign countries, especially since the incerasing wiredness of the world and these countries in particular makes it easier (and more cost effective) than ever.
I think that in the next few years there will be an even greater outsourcing of these sorts of projects. India and Bangladesh are typically cheaper markets then China to work in, and we can probably look forward to those countries entering into these markets.
Now for my editorial, because I have to have it (you can stop reading if you'd like). with the US job market as tight as it is right now, it is a major ethical dillema to be outsourcing High paying jobs to countires where the worker that would make $60,000 a year here, makes $5,000 over there. It puts the US economy in grave danger of collapsing in on itself as these lucrative jobs are removed and th emarket has to return to a service and agricultural based economy (the latter of which is becoming a smaller employer but larger business by the year). In all hopes this would see the rise in the standards of living for the average person in China, Micronesia, wherever, but it doesn't seem like the transition would be quick as workers there would have to get it in their heads that they deserrve that amount of money. (To sum, it's like an emerging basketball trend, American players (on the whole) have no actual proficiency with teh sport (though they have a great deal of raw physical talent), and eastern European players do. This means an increasing influx of Eastern European players until they become complacent in their position and the Americans learn to play the game (with little things like passing, and team work)).
Ideally, (and I'm being naive) there is a way to protect American jobs while increasing (or ostensibly increasing) the standard of living in foreign countries. If the US government, or the AMerican consumer, would refuse to allow the sale of (or purchase) goods that were manufactured or generated by workers who were not treated equally to their American counterparts. Of course, in teh drive for cheap stuff there are no rules. [end]
"Wages will go up, and quality of goods will go up - and with it, the prices of the goods. A hole will open for another poor country to start producing the "cheap junk"."
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Once the companies leave then a bust cycle will begin. There will be a prolonged period of unemployment and depression/recession. Eventually the standard of living will be pretty much where it was before. Maybe once the cambodians (or wherever the jobs went) get uppidy and demand more money the jobs might come back but more likely they will migrate to africa or someplace even more destitute.
Eventually some country will imprison a sizable minority of it's people and offer their labor for cheap to companies. This form of legalized slavery will start another chain reaction and before long a sizable chunk of the humans on this planet will be imprisoned and enslaved. People will be jailed for having one to two marijuana seeds for ten years and in prison they will work for AT&T making telemarketing calls.
Oh wait a minute that's already happening right here in the USA.
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispa
http://www.prisontalk.c
http://kcd.com/goa/issues/2000/q1/Jail.h
I am sure these kinds of prison labor programs will be expanded hugely in the US and overseas. Imagine a couple of million slaves in china, US or africa manufacturing toys or sneakers for next to nothing. Of course the US prisons will have to degrade to the level of chinese or african prisons to compete.
War is necrophilia.
Generally people have wanted the smallest laptop, but someone has to set the record for the biggest laptop.
Apparently you know very little about Mandarin, or it's input. For Japanese input, there is a big speed penalty. But Chinese input is faster.
Most people in Taiwan use either bpmf input or canjie. Most people in mainland China use either pinyin or canjie. Bpmf and pinyin are phonetic input methods which are approximately the same speed as English. Canjie input is based upon the structure of a character instead, and is MUCH faster than English input. I can type over 200 words per minute with canjie, and many professional typists can type at over 300.
There is no "slowing factor" in typing Mandarin. In fact, I would argue that by lacking a meaning based orthographic system, that English is a "slowing factor".
China will own IT.
I'm a gnu world man.