Foxconn Thinks the iPhone 5 Is a Pain 312
pigrabbitbear writes "China's largest electronics manufacturer, the already-loathed Foxconn, is now taking the fall for the iPhone 5 shortage that's annoyed consumers and worried investors in recent weeks. What's the holdup? They don't have enough parts? They're training new line workers? They're too busy trying to regain control of their factories after employees started rioting? Nah. According to the company, the iPhone 5 is just a huge pain to put together. That bit about the riots is a little bit true, too, though."
Hey if China is whining about building them.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Pain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Foxconn may say the iphone5 is a pain, but I think the workers getting paid peanuts for 80 hours shifts might have a different idea of what 'pain' means. Besides, how much quality assembly is really possible when your workforce is bleary-eyed and exhausted? I bet there's a lot of QA rejects and extra controls required to keep quality from plummeting.
Re:Hey if China is whining about building them.... (Score:0, Insightful)
Because even if the fans are rabbid, they're not going to pay $2500 for an iPhone vs $900 for a Samsung Galaxy SIII. You don't make money by throwing good after bad. There are good reasons to stop outsourcing manufacturing to the 3rd world, but it needs to be all companies on an equal footing....and it takes time to retool. Your idea is an immature fantasy in the literal sense unfortunately.
Re:Hey if China is whining about building them.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not build them here?
Because no one would do the job for $40 or less per hour with full benefits except for migrant/immigrant workers. Then those that didn't want the job would bitch how migrant/immigrant are taking their job. Mean while they don't actually want those jobs.
Re:Design for manufacturing? (Score:5, Insightful)
They can't build robots capable of the same wide variety of fine, rapid movements as people. Assembling the device robotically would require a large number of purpose build machines to carry out each step. That would add years to the amount of time it takes to bring a product to market, which is unacceptable in consumer electronics.
Re:Ug (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no interest in defending Foxconn or Apple for the conditions in their factories, but yes, this article (and others on that site) is so flawed and snarky it's barely worth crediting.
My favorite gems:
The company had been running an internship program that put 14- to 16-year-old children on the factory floor
And the link they reference in that quote (to anther article on their OWN site) says it was vocational interns (16+) and college students (18+). So more accurate would be "16 to 22". You'd think they could quote their own articles correctly.
Also from that article referenced: The suicide rate at Foxconn is still lower than that of the general population in China, but striking for its concentration among a group of workers at a single company.
Wha?? Someone failed basic statistics. If the rate is lower over a population (where "rate" = incidents/population), how is the concentration (eh, also incidents/population) striking? In fact, it's only striking because of the *anecdotes* sensationalized by stories like this...
Basic human rights and working conditions in China are a big problem, but it doesn't help the cause to make up facts and statistics that don't exist...
Re:Ug (Score:5, Insightful)
Contextualizing, it is likely that work environment should discourage suicide, maybe the rate is alarming compared against similar factories
Why does anyone still care? (Score:3, Insightful)
The folks who stood in line for hours(or days in some cases), or ordered one online and still haven't seen it yet, got screwed. Not because of manufacturing delays, but because they bought a phone that was already out of date before it was even released. HTC and Samsung had better phones out eight and six months ago, respectively. I bought the one x. It has a better LCD, better resolution, better talk time, same resolution camera, NFC, WiFi direct, and a whole list of other things the "cutting edge" iPhone 5 doesn't have. And here's the punchline..... I paid $300 less for my One X than you did for the 32 gb iPhone 5.
Re:Hey if China is whining about building them.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Riiight that why all the assembly jobs are still in the US.
It's not really the money. China has something like a $70 price advantage on a US-built iPhone. Apple people would pay it.
What you get in China, is that the factory that makes those mini screws you need for the iPhone is just down the road. This doesn't happen in Oklahoma - the industries have all left. The logistics of doing it in the US are nearly impossible.
Second, if you wanted to build that screw factory, in China, you just grease the right palms and build a screw factory, maybe with State financial support. In the US you begin a 7-year permitting process.
In the city where my office is Red Lobster wanted to put a restaurant. One of their canned designs they've done a hundred of. After two years in the city planner's office, they were at a meeting and the planner decided that she didn't like the propane tank in the back of the proposed restaurant, because, she said, somebody could pull off on the Interstate and shoot it with a high powered rifle, and cause an explosion that would kill everybody in the restaurant. This has never happened, even in a Michael Bay movie, and there are a dozen other restaurants in the plaza with the same setup, but she decided that Red Lobster should bury an underground tank (in a flood plane) big enough for all the restaurants to share, and that would make the world a happier place. They told the planner to go to hell, walked out of the meeting, and never came back to town.
21st Century America - inexplicably uncompetitive.
Re:Design for manufacturing? (Score:4, Insightful)
"A lot of that can be done quickly using 3D printers"
ugh, ok when your producing thousands to millions of units per day, you cant take the line down every 20 min cause your rep-rap made doohicky crapped out. even good 3D printers cant make parts that are going to hold up in a production line very long.
so now your getting shit milled and waterjet to make special tools for a product that changes every year just to inset a screw that cost a multiplier more than a persons yearly income, even if you were paying American rates.
Re:Hey if China is whining about building them.... (Score:4, Insightful)
So you steal stuff by paying for it?
His point was that they bought John and now John doesn't contribute anymore. Presumably because he spends all his time on proprietary code.
I don't know if that's true, but his argument, as framed, is that Apple took FreeBSD's most valuable asset and didn't give back after that. That's woudln't be 'paying for it', though John would have been well-rewarded for his efforts.
health care being tied to jobs hurts the USA for j (Score:5, Insightful)
health care being tied to jobs hurts the USA for jobs and getting rid of that can give us more jobs hear.
Re:Hey if China is whining about building them.... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not unethical to profit from the fruits of your labor. It is unethical to profit from the fruits of other people's labor, if you don't assign their fair share for their labor to them.
Re:Ug (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that Chinese years or Western ones? Because a Chinese who says they are 14 is actually 13 (they start counting at 1, like Fortran).
What is happening to Slashdot's submit process ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Samzenpus, can you please do a better job on the submission approval process?
" China's largest electronics manufacturer, the already-loathed Foxconn ..."
First of all, Foxconn is from Taiwan, not China.
Second, no matter how much the submitter pigrabbitbear loaths Foxconn, the ill-feeling pigrabbitbear has towards Foxconn is NOT related to the story of TFA, and Samzenpus, the mod who approved the submit, should have known better than allowed "the already-loathed Foxconn" to pass through the approval process.
Slashdot is faltering, and it's not the users who has brought it down.
It's the moderators, such as Samzenpus, who have failed to carry out their job duty, in a professional manner.
Globalism... (Score:3, Insightful)
I am NOT a fan of globalism. (But that doesn't mean I am a protectionist. I simply feel that it is unsustainable to expect a high wage economy to purchase high wage products indefinately, when employment rates in that high wage economy drop like rocks, as all the jobs move overseas, due to people chasing low low prices. The result muddies the market terribly, and I really don't see how it can be sustained. In the short term it makes you filthy ass rich. In the long term it causes protracted recessions.)
During the Cold War we in the West were sheilded from a huge pool of cheap skilled labor. This created a high standard of living in the West. When the Americans set out to destroy the economy of the USSR and 'won ' the Cold War they also made that pool of cheap labor available for exploitation by Western corporations. Naturally Western corporations sought to maximize their profits by migrating production facilities to where the most skilled of the cheap labor is, to the old 'Eastern Bloc', without thinking about the long term consequences since American corporations in particular are incapable of planning further ahead than one fiscal quarter. Are you missing Communism and the Iron Curtain yet? (That last part is sarcasm.)
Re:Hey if China is whining about building them.... (Score:3, Insightful)
So you steal stuff by paying for it?
His point was that they bought John and now John doesn't contribute anymore. Presumably because he spends all his time on proprietary code.
I don't know if that's true, but his argument, as framed, is that Apple took FreeBSD's most valuable asset and didn't give back after that. That's woudln't be 'paying for it', though John would have been well-rewarded for his efforts.
It's not true. He couldn't even get Jordan's name right, much less his involvement and commitment to FreeBSD at the time he was picked up by Apple. It's a huge disservice to the FreeBSD project to suggest that one single person, such as Jordan, mattered as much as OP suggests.
Re:Hey if China is whining about building them.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know if that's true, but his argument, as framed, is that Apple took FreeBSD's most valuable asset and didn't give back after that. That's woudln't be 'paying for it', though John would have been well-rewarded for his efforts.
You're insulting the many people who have, and still are, working on FreeBSD after Hubbard left. The project is just fine (about to release 9.1 shortly).
Life goes on.
Re:Why does anyone still care? (Score:4, Insightful)