Nexus Q Stretches "Made in USA" Label

sl4shd0rk writes "Among the much ballyhooed tech at Google I/O last week was the Google Nexus Q. Google made an effort to proudly point out the device was "Made in the USA" and even had it stamped on the back of it. A tear-down at ifixit.com however, reveals the guts of the thing are mostly manufactured overseas at the expected locations (China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, et al). Wired also posted a tear-down in which they reveal a die-casting shop in Wisconsin is the source of the zinc housing, but certainly not the entire device as some news sources reported. It's great that Google decided to utilize the struggling U.S. manufacturing sector for this, but claiming the device is USA made, and being blatantly vague about its origins is quite misleading." How struggling the U.S. manufacturing sector is depends on who you ask and how you measure, remember.

Comments

Re:No, it isn't misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as someone who's worked with Customs for years, once you have a product broken down and the parts identified, it can be quite easy to tell if it's made in the USA... from a legal standpoint:

http://www.international.gc.ca/trade-agreements-accords-commerciaux/agr-acc/nafta-alena/texte/anx401a.aspx?lang=en&view=d

Annex 401 specific rules of origin. To summarize, there's various methods by which you can determine the country of origin of something if the parts are all made elsewhere. If all of the parts qualify for Annex 401, or the value of all non-US origin parts is less than say... 40% of the total value (can't remember the exact percentage, can't be bothered to look it up, but you get the general idea), then that there is a made in USA product.

Technically, you can have an item with absolutely zero individual pieces of it made in the USA, but if the final product is assembled here, and it qualifies in having the right tariff code changes, then that just became made in the USA.

And that is what is required

[Sycraft-fu]

Those labels are required by law, and what they require is that the country of final assembly is where things are labeled. Now you can argue if that is stupid or not, but that is how it is done, and has been for a long time (back when it was implemented it made more sense).

Almost all tech devices are a hodge podge of components from different places. Even a single component can have many places. Like say you get a 22nm Ivy Bridge Intel processor. Well it was fabricated in the USA, in Chandler Arizona. That's where Intel's 22nm fab is (though I understand they are bringing up 22nm at their fab in Israel soon here). However once it is fabbed, it is shipped off to another site for testing and packing. There is one in the US, but also one in Costa Rica, Singapore, and other places. So your processor may well be stamped "Costa Rica" even though the fabrication was done in the US.

Of course that then goes on a motherboard almost certainly made in China, they are pretty much the only place that makes them. However on that motherboard is components from all over. The capacitors are often from Japan, they are really big in that market. The southbridge chipset is probably from the US, other incidental chips often from Taiwan. The memory that goes on there then depends on the brand. A lot of it is made in Taiwan, some in Germany, some in the US, just depends on who you get it from it is a lot more world wide. The harddrive is probably from Malaysia, that is where most are made, though there are other places and of course the harddrive itself has a bunch of components from different places.

This just continues. We live in a global economy and most things are built of components from all over. In some cases, you discover that only one country really does a given thing. They've gotten good at it, so nobody else really competes.

The "made in" labels always specify the place of final assembly. If you want that changed, well you can work on that, but it is pretty entrenched and I doubt it is going anywhere. No way we are going to list every place. Otherwise you are going to have a device that says "Made of components from the US, Canada, Mexico, China, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, Germany, France, and oh fuck it about 20 other nations."

Re:No, it isn't misleading

[coldfarnorth]

The FTC requires that country-of-origin claims be assessed by portioning the manufacturing costs of the final product. A couple of dollars worth of foreign components/costs in an otherwise domestically sourced product that costs $300 is not considered to be an issue. If, on the other hand, the final product cost $5, then it's not acceptable to make a "Made in the USA" claim.

Here is a link to the FTC page which describes the situation a bit more clearly, if not nearly so briefly.
http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus03-complying-made-usa-standard