i-Device Manufacturing Unprofitable To China

N!NJA writes "One of my favorite facts of this past year was the proof that China makes almost nothing out of assembling Apple's iPads and iPhones. From the article: 'If you want lots of jobs and lots of high paying jobs then you’re not going to find them in manufacturing. They’re where the money is, in the design, the software and the retailing of the products, not the physical making of them. Manufacturing is just so, you know, 20th century.'"

Comments

Re:Apple basically is the tablet market.

[girlintraining]

Yes, Apple can sell millions of tablets, but this is only because they have a very gullible following that other manufacturers just don't have.

Most iPhones purchased 3-4 years ago still receive software updates from Apple. You won't find another domestic phone manufacturer with that level of support. Techies bemoan people's use of macintosh, but 1 in 7 people use a mac, and yet 98% of the phone calls to technical support are for PCs. If PC owners are comparatively "smarter", shouldn't that number be lower? "Apple fanatics, on the other, don't care about utility, but rather just the possession of expensive status symbols" -- I would say that the statistics do not bear that out. Apple customers want things that are easy to use, have long end-of-life product support, and have excellent customer service.

It's a very convoluted one not built upon the more traditional and common factors underlying real markets caused by need and demand.

Yeah. I can't see the appeal in a product you can take anywhere, use for 10 hours, and provides quick and ready access to the internet and multimedia resources, and has a powerful enough processor to play many kinds of games. Oh. Wait... that's what us "PC users" keep hoping our phones are going to do for us. Someday. Also... if the market isn't doing what you want it to, it must have become martian and no longer reacting to supply and demand instead of say, simply not meeting your expectations.