Uh, early Macs cost $5000 and up. Today they start at $1100 for all-in-ones. My company bought me a lowend (there were 2 lines that year) laptop around 1996 for $3500, today they start at $1000. Add in a calc for inflation and the numbers are more ridiculous.
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Foxconn: Apple Not Subsidizing Recent Wage Increases
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Uh, early Macs cost $5000 and up. Today they start at $1100 for all-in-ones. My company bought me a lowend (there were 2 lines that year) laptop around 1996 for $3500, today they start at $1000. Add in a calc for inflation and the numbers are more ridiculous.
No, but labor can easily be 50% of all costs for a company. Is that enough to give you 2nd thoughts?
You would assume wrong, but that would be my fault. I am not from China but I did work in a Foxconn factory in the US and it was Hell.
I could bore you to death with the work hazards/health issues/poor working conditions with my time there. It is actually hard to believe some of the things that are put up with, especially in a company on American soil.
I'm sorry, I guess I should have marked my post as being sarcastic too. It was pretty subtle and easy to miss....
Because it's all about hating on Apple. The haters are pure psychopathic monster.
According to the Financial Times, the base salary of a worker putting together Apple products is $140 - -per month. This is before overtime.
I'm not familiar with US minimum wage rates, but a figure used in this thread has been $7.25/hr. Assuming four 40 hour weeks, and you get not quite $1200 per month. Before benefits.
Since minimum wage is not considered a "living wage" i.e. you can't actually pay all your bills, food, rent, etc with it - its fair to say that a manufacturer would need to pay more - much more - than minimum wage.
Or provide the housing, food, medical care, schools, etc in-house. Which is what Foxxconn does.
So, to take your example - it the labour to assemble a computer is $25 in China, would you buy the same unit if it cost $250 to $450 more?
Considering the wailing and gnashing of teeth heard on these boards when Apple doesn't drop the price of their "old" systems by a measly $20 or $40, I'd say the answer was obvious.
This comment is addressed to some of the other posters.....
The suicide rate at Foxxconn appears to be lower than in China in general. People kill themselves for many reasons, including bad relationships, getting caught in a crime, etc etc. To ascribe these deaths to working conditions is jumping to conclusions. One could argue, looking at the suicide rate, that working conditions are good enough to ameliorate the normal background rate of suicides.
I see what you're saying. So let me further this. Let's say to keep it simple and roughly basing it on your numbers that an American requires 10 times the wage to produce the same product. That increases the cost to manufacturer the product by 10 times. Which is a lot. However, if a single unit can effectively be made for $6 worth of labor in China, that would translate to $60 worth of labor in America... which isn't a number that's hard to swallow. However, if the labor to assemble a machine is $50 in China, then that number is $500 here in the US, which isn't easy to swallow. It all comes down to how many minutes per worker it takes to assemble it. Once the process is put in place these machines can be slammed together very quickly. I'm sure if I put 2 or 3 MBP's together I could get the process down to less than 5 mins per machine. This is of course simplifying the process since I'm sure it's an assembly line and doesn't take into account other overhead and the off time that isn't spent physically assembling the machine.
It's not just the labour to assemble the parts, but also to move the parts into the factory from a shipping container (just for argument lets assume that once the parts are in the shipping container from whatever factory makes them that the cost to ship the parts to the US is exactly balanced by the savings of not having to ship the finished products to the US). Also the labour to clean the factories, to repair the machines, to maintain the building, to package the finished products, to load the shipping containers, and to do all the minor administrative office work like payroll, dealing with employee issues, sickdays etc.
Then you have the engineers who design the machines, create the new machines for the new processes, the quality control checkers. I'm sure I've missed a few groups of employees in there.
Then you have the particularly American preference for basing their purchasing decisions solely on price - though at least Apple is partially insulated from that, thank goodness.
