It might be a little worse in China, but you get a lot of the same behaviour from contract manufacturers everywhere else. I've been working on a high volume consumer product (you've almost certainly heard of it) and the manufacturer has used any slight delay by any other party to shift the schedule back by weeks or months. Late in the process we realised that they'd switched a capacitor for a lower cost one - same capacitance but lacking in some other spec points that were important. There isn't a lot of room for them to build things to a lower spec because the specs are pretty thorough and nailed down, but anywhere there is room they have gone lower cost.
No comments yet.