[jasonkester]

That's the thing that drives me nuts about buying stuff manufactured in China.

They'll make this amazing Remote Control Car, with good suspension, a battery that lasts half an hour, plenty of power, and just all around amazing. But then it'll break after a day because somebody saved 1/20th of a penny by speccing this impossibly thin wire the thickness of a human hair to hook that powerful battery to the powerful motor and inside the remote.

They could have used actual wire-sized wire and had the most amazing product ever, for roughly zero more cost. (Possibly less, since surely it must cost _more_ to manufacture and solder micron-diameter wiring). It just makes no sense.

[mattmaroon]

It makes a lot of sense if you agreed on a price per unit before everything was locked in. If their profit is a flat price minus expenses, lower expenses is more profit.

I ordered cups and did specify the thickness (based on a reference) of the plastic but didn’t specify how thick the boxes they shipped in should be. Guess what happened!

[JoshTriplett]

> It makes a lot of sense if you agreed on a price per unit before everything was locked in. If their profit is a flat price minus expenses, lower expenses is more profit.

That's the thing that makes no sense to me. Wouldn't it work better for everyone involved, including the manufacturer, if they come back with a "here's exactly how we interpreted your spec and what materials we're using, including cases where we picked something you left unconstrained", and a corresponding price for using those materials, with the understanding that if you want different materials you get a different price, before they do any manufacturing whatsoever?

[rkangel]

There's an extra point here about how quickly home grown stuff can go from drawing board to manufacture. Because it takes us months or years, we go through multiple iterations of prototyping and discover a lot of design issues. They seem to go through much less iteration because they can get stuff manufactured quickly and so don't always discover longevity issues like a too-thin wire.

[mlrtime]

You're not wrong, but there are 1000 of those rc cars, and maybe 20% have that feature you want, but everyone buys the cheapest because they don't know which has slightly better quality.

Now go with Kyosho or Tamiya and you DO know it will be best in class, but at 10x the cost.

[detourdog]

We live in an age where we can make our own inflation. We can choose between 2 products one with realistic expectations at greater cost and one that just looks like the other product but didn’t go the extra mile to ensure the product will function.

[detourdog]

I felt the same thing with GE home appliances. They would last forever if someone didn’t choose to make some little plastic thing so cheap.

[hvs]

* ANY consumer-grade home appliances.

[ebonnafoux]

China is a 1.4 billion people country, more than US + Europe, so it is expected that there is a wild gap between high end product and low cost there.

[alansaber]

This stuff is inevitable as per the article, it's just whether there's a will to fix it for the next batch