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The Laptop Supply Chain
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "When a U.S. consumer orders a laptop from HP or other big sellers, how does the machine get made? Often via a complex supply chain in Taiwan and China, shaped by rocky cross-Strait relations, according to the Wall Street Journal: 'Outsourcing to low-cost, high-quality Taiwanese manufacturers has helped make Dell and H-P the world's top two PC companies in terms of sales...But the relationship between U.S. computer firms and their third-party manufacturers can be tricky. In the struggle to retain an element of control over their suppliers, H-P, Dell and others play contract manufacturers against each other to keep prices falling and ensure no supplier gains too much leverage.'"
There are barebone notebook with just the case and motherboard these day (Many avaialble at www.newegg.com for instant) and let you have some flexiablity in setting up a notebook yourself as far as component goes. Brand like Acer, ECS are very popular.
Still much more limiting then a desktop PC, but it is a far cry from a few years ago where you can only have one model of video card and one properity casing CD-Rom drive you can upgrade to a writer for $200.
In cases like the above, the channel leader can leverage CMs against one another to drive down price. That's your day-to-day negotiation strategy . Your choices become much more limited when you're not the company leveraging the supply chain. The customer isn't always right, sometimes it's the customer that has to grin and bear it.
I don't know how on-topic any of this is, but I'm tired and don't want to write my weekly status report.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
[1] Lionel Menchaca, a Dell spokesman, says the Round Rock, Texas, company obtains partly built laptops from contract manufacturers, but does final assembly at its own factories in Ireland, Malaysia or China, where microprocessors, software and other key components are added.
[2]When a customer in the U.S. clicks on Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Web site to purchase one of its Pavilion zd8000 laptop computers, the order quickly arrives thousands of miles away at a factory in China run by a less-familiar name, Quanta Computer Inc.
Pre-Lenovo, the IBM laptop tended to be significanly more expensive than any of it's major competitors (not counting Apple). Therefore, IBM had already included the higher quality of their laptop in the price. The ThinkPad is a very popular purchase amongst corporations. Companies were willing to pay the extra price for the perceived quality and service that IBM provided.
IBM products were good, but too cheap for IBM to make money on it.Last year, IBM made a profit on the PC and laptop business. But, they only made 1 or 2 percentage points profit on that hardware. I just checked HP's web site and they reported a profit margin of 2.1% on their PC's and Laptops for the first quarter of 2005. So, the margins IBM was making were comparable to at least one of it's main competitors.
And their opinion was clearly that technical superiority meant nothing in a market that appears to be dominated by price.I think you are right on this point, but I would have phrased it differently. IBM's opinion was that laptops and PC's have become a commodity and the profit margins were too thin to justify remaining in that line of business. IBM does still has a "toe-hold" in the PC/laptop business, since it owns a minority share of Lenovo.
Trust me, I deal with chinese and taiwan manufacturers of boards. Their idea of quality is "will it pass ougoing inspection?" NOT "Will it last more then 90 days".
I just dealt with a OEM that makes boards for themselves in China, and even there they refused to fix a problem because it would mean a loss of face.
It amazes me the truly poor work that is done here in China and abroad. I don't see this nearly as much in the US [although i do see it], and if anything is going to save our board manufacturers it may be this.
of this story.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
- What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel?
- Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?
He then bangs on about Microsoft for a bit, as if Apple would ever be a threat to Microsoft, who have a whole new OS on the cards and have been running on these fabled Intel processor things for decades. I'll tell you the real reason: IBM have given Apple the cold shoulder. Look at it this way: Apple represents so little business for IBM that it doesn't make sense to keep developing new chips for them. IBM have their work cut out with the next gen consoles, and Apple is a teeny tiny spec compared to the massive quantity of chips IBM will have to produce to meet demand for these consoles.Absolutely nothing. The article , and it is unlikely that Apple will suffer greatly from this. They have other products such as their iPod and iTunes services to support themselves. Sure, sales will fall, but it's my prediction that AAPL will fall and then pick up as market analysts predict a rise in Apple sales in the next few months due to a new product release (Intel Macs). The Osborne Effect doesn't really hold water, Apple already have a development system available, and have already ported their OS. They have been planning this for five years. They do have a product to deliver, and they are very, very good at hype.
He's right on this one. No.
AMD aren't that interesting to Apple, they're already at maximum capacity as I mentioned, and they're quite happy producing chips for PCs. They also don't have the marketing clout of Intel and they're less well known. Apple chose Intel because they've been dumped by IBM, and Intel are more than happy to help Apple out because it secures them some more market penetration, which they need because they've made a considerable amount of blunders recently. Both are helping eachother out. It's simple symbiosis. If they didn't, their futures are unpredictable.
Intel could still have bought Apple as Cringely states, but I deem this to be highly unlikely. Intel is not in a good position to make acquisitions like this, and value their PC market a lot too.
It's interesting, IBM actually received the bulk of our laptop orders, and *all* off the field and upper management orders. They were reliable, solid (well, bullet-proof really) machines that really seemed to rival Apple in the "just works" category. We know we paid a premium to buy IBM as opposed to Dell or someone, but the difference was worth it, especially when having to replace *another* LCD screen on a Dell that fell apart being hauled too and from the office. I can only imagine how often our field laptops would have required repair/replacement, we looked at going with Toughbooks once, but the additional cost wasn't justified with what the Thinkpads were capable of.
While large manufacturers build machines on exclusive designs from resellers like Dell, IBM, HP, Sony, etc., many of these same manufacturers have thier own branded designs available through smaller resellers.
These manufacturer designs are cheaper because they are often sold unbranded. They also experience shorter timespans between hardware revisions because they don't have to wait for those exclusive design specs from resellers, and thus often have the latest components in their models months ahead of those from the major resellers.
ASUS, one of the largest manufacturers in Asia, supplies Apple with Powerbooks, iPod shuffle & minis, Sony with many of their laptops, and have been an on-and-off builder for IBM in the past (there was a report in March of ASUS in major talks with Lenovo to be their supplier in the future), among other famous names. This is one of the many well-kept secrets in the laptop industry.
ASUS has seen their own laptop line more than double in sales since last year, mainly due to word of mouth between computer enthusiasts venturing into the laptop market.
Major manufacturers who supply brand name resellers as well as popular specialty shops:
ASUS
Mitac
Uniwill
Clevo
Compal
Some resellers (VoodooPC, Falcon Northwest, Hypersonic, ABS, and Alienware among others) add some paint and a label (and, like good captalists, at least $500 to the pricetag) to these machines to come up with their own specialty models. Many other less visible resellers (MWave, Discountlaptops, ISTNC, Proportable, and others) sell the exact same machines unbranded in customizable barebone configurations for incredibly low prices.
As computer enthusiasts ditch their unwieldy desktops for portable solutions, we will find manufacturer brands becoming more and more visible to the general public, and large brands will have even more competition.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
You can clearly see that each "single" battery, is a serial arrangement of eight smaller cells.
You don't say?
battery
noun ( pl. -teries)
1 a container consisting of one or more cells, in which chemical energy is converted into electricity and used as a source of power : [as adj. ] battery power.
Bitchslapped. Neat.
'Outsourcing to low-cost, high-quality Taiwanese manufacturers has helped make Dell and H-P the world's top two PC companies in terms of sales
Wrong. Dell and HP only outsource about 1/5 of their stuff to Taiwan. 2/5 ends up in India, the other 2/5 is in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Well, the number didn't need to the same same - could have been six, seven, nine or whatever.
They could have used 60+ Lithium coin batteries and still remained within the package size and price.
At discount prices, the individual cells cost around $5 each, giving you $40 for a battery with eight cells, while the manufacturers charge around $200 for a packaged laptop battery, but only $50 for a digital camcorder.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads