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How Motherboards Are Made
mikemuch writes "Reporter Mark Hachman recently took a tour of a motherboard manufacturing facility operated by Gigabyte in Taiwan, and has posted a complete slideshow of the process. He was surprised by how much still had to be done by hand, but the company is still able to produce 1.5 million motherboards a month."
I'm fairly certain it will be a daughterboard.
Also there was much more detail on the ATE and soak testing.
Wrong. It is currently cheaper in the short to medium term to continue to use humans instead of investing in research to create a machine to do the job.
A better example than motherboards is clothing. Take T-shirts for example. The textiles industry was historically the first to become industrialized, yet here we are 250+ years later, and there are still people in sweatshops making the simplest items of clothing. Why? Because it's technically too difficult to automate clothing manufacture? Whatever.
The reality is that no motherboard, clothing, or any other company is willing to actually spend money and innovate. Find ways of making basic items by the millions, quickly, reliably, cheaply. And the reason they're not willing to do it is because they can still find cheaper and cheaper sources of labour. On China, they're current strategy when wages on the east coast get too expensive, is just to move 100km inland, rinse and repeat.
There is lack of innovation in the manufacturing sector. It's caused an oversupply of cheap labour. Simply put, there is no pressure on factory owners to continue the industrial revolution, and human progress. Instead there's an incentive to use quasi, and what the hell, full blown slave labour.
I harp on China, but it's happening all over. It's happening a lot closer to home than you think. Our society is back-peddling, and it's down to the fact that rabid (no so)free market capitalism has become the dominant ethos of our politics and media, where it is assumed that no matter what the issue problem or injustice is, the omnipresent "market" will find a solution to all our ills.
I'm not some fanatical anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism protester. I just think that too much power, not money, power, is being concentrated into the hands of private companies. I don't like big government either, but I still think that corporations should be reigned in. If we don't, your children or grandchildren could find themselves like those Chinese brickworkers, force to work at the barrel of a privately owned gun.
P.S.
I believe in a free and fair market. Why should workers here have to compete against countries with lower standards?
May the Maths Be with you!
It's discouraging. I've watched America go from robotic car washes to "100% hand wash" over the last 25 years.
The assembly line for the Macintosh IIci was more automated than this one. Back in the 1980s, when consumer electronics came from Japan, the Japanese makers were frantically trying to automated enough to keep their labor costs down. Seiko and Sony developed some beautiful technologies for making small consumer electronics items untouched by human hands.
Now everybody has those long lines of low-paid women in some low-wage area.
In light of the current expose of child labor?
You make it sound as though you found yourself at a breakfast table, croissant in one hand, Le Monde in another, with a stunned expression on your face having just learned that all the cheap clothing and shoes and furniture and electronics that we in the first-world just LOVE were manufactured by a bevy of tiny little hands in sweatshops.
I'm sorry, but wasn't that entirely obvious? Hasn't this issue been on the tip of our humanitarian tongues for at least twenty years? And when you went on to say "One has to wonder what conditions exist in factories where people don't get guided tours" all I could think is "NO! One does NOT have to wonder" because one should already KNOW.
These conditions are deplorable.
But the GP said that it's "sad" that human labor like this is cheaper than machinery. Well, perhaps, but I disagree slightly. Until we put all those people to work, until we bring them into the global economy, their situations will never improve. Only after we hire these people will we begin to see upward pressure on wages. Only after this generation--and perhaps the next--work painstaking hours to produce our shiny toys will you begin to see what more closely resembles a living wage in these countries.
My then-girlfriend did her Graduate thesis in Ecomonics on this 2 years ago and her research led her to believe that in 25 years you'll see the average Chinese worker making $2/hr in 2005 dollars. That would be a stunning change in the world economy, in terms of both cost-of-production and consumer markets.