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Refreshed MacBook Pros show slipping standards at Apple?

Depends !!!

Evil Spoonman said:
Isn't it a bit early to be making sensational titles like that? So far we have a sample size of two or three (between iFixit and these forums). I'd hardly say that was conclusive. We also don't know how heavily retooled the product lines were, or where these machines were produced (new plant?). It is quite likely that these are teething pains, Apple is aware of them, and they will be rectified before too long.
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ALSO, you don't know for sure how many other people have had their hands on a particular machine before it gets to another reviewer. I had a pre-production machine to evaluate (from another manufacturer, NOT Apple) a year or two ago, it had already been through at least one other person's hands, the insides rattled so badly it was amazing that it worked..... opening it up, there were a myriad of screws missing, clips broken etc....... reviewers are not always the most careful of people.
 
davegoody said:
ALSO, you don't know for sure how many other people have had their hands on a particular machine before it gets to another reviewer. I had a pre-production machine to evaluate (from another manufacturer, NOT Apple) a year or two ago, it had already been through at least one other person's hands, the insides rattled so badly it was amazing that it worked..... opening it up, there were a myriad of screws missing, clips broken etc....... reviewers are not always the most careful of people.
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Quite true. ifixit doesn't get review machines though.
 
Wonder if, based on these statements, a refurbished Mac is BETTER than a new one?
 
aurichie said:
Interesting article:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...terworld/news/feed+(Latest+from+Computerworld)



Among the findings were an unlocked ZIF, stripped screw near subwoofer enclosure, and unusual amounts of thermal paste applied to both the CPU and GPU.

:eek:
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Yup. One sample out of hundreds of thousands is conclusive. :rolleyes:

Besides:

Thermal compound looked the same as every laptop I have ever stripped down. If you don't get your laptop from a boutique company like XoticPC (and even then they charge extra to apply good thermal compound) then you will get a mess like in the OP's example.

ZIF - zero insertion force - connectors pop open easy when being stripped down. That means nothing.
 
lewdvig said:
Yup. One sample out of hundreds of thousands is conclusive. :rolleyes:

Besides:

Thermal compound looked the same as every laptop I have ever stripped down. If you don't get your laptop from a boutique company like XoticPC (and even then they charge extra to apply good thermal compound) then you will get a mess like in the OP's example.

ZIF - zero insertion force - connectors pop open easy when being stripped down. That means nothing.
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Thanks for reading the whole thread before posting.
 
billgates99 said:
my understanding is that the average electronics factory worker wage in China ranges from 42 - 64 cents per hour.

Even if it were possible to switch manufacturing to the US, forgetting about the likely collapse of the global economy, can you even conceive of what a ten-fold to 20-fold increase in labor cost would do to the retail pricing of a Mac Book Pro?
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Maybe $50, tops. Remarkably little of the cost is labor any more. Besides, with Apple making a 30 to 40 percent margin on these computers, the labor cost isn't really the issue like it was, say, 15 years ago; the issue is that corporations get a huge tax deduction for offshoring, once of many deductions that gives US corporations that offshore one of the lowest effective corporate taxes in the world even though the headline rate looks really high.

It's time to strip these deductions for foreign production out of the tax code. There is, of course, a catch; this has been going on for so long that there really isn't any facility in the US capable of doing the manufacturing.
 
People go on about Apple quality control "slipping."

Hmmmmm.

"Slipping" quality control was the Yonah CoreDuo machines from 2006, overheating, buzzing, whining, shutting down and crashing their way into infamy, and with the plastic ones having their cases disintegrate.

"Slipping" quality control was the liquid-cooled G5s from 2004-05 literally wetting themselves and shorting out the electronics.

This nonsense with saving five cents a machine by having an ice-cream machine automatically apply enough thermal paste to fill a two-scoop cone is simply an ongoing run-of-the-mill annoyance, and while it's annoying and frustrating and I'd gladly pay the extra five cents, it's overshadowed by a big improvement in the performance and the cooling of the hardware. I have heard way less complaining over the past two to three years about Apple quality in general. Believe me, I know what they were like a few years ago. This isn't slipping quality, it's improving quality.
 
balamw said:
You also have to include the costs of shipping and dealing with warranty issues created by the shoddy construction. These can offset a large part of the labor "savings".

This month's Wired magazine has a couple of interesting articles about this and this one in particular is relevant here.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_madeinamerica

B
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Thanks for posting. It's a good article but we also really need to address the tax issue as well by which companies get a big break from US taxes by offshoring. That's creating a government incentive, not an economic one, for moving production abroad. Not a good move especially with how much we owe to other countries and how many jobs we need in the US.
 
dblissmn said:
Thanks for posting. It's a good article but we also really need to address the tax issue as well by which companies get a big break from US taxes by offshoring. That's creating a government incentive, not an economic one, for moving production abroad. Not a good move especially with how much we owe to other countries and how many jobs we need in the US.
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Hopefully there will be new incentives soon in the US to create some new jobs. I know there are some government incentives in Canada to companies who build products here, and I would assume the same is true in the states, but they really need to give this some serious thought!
 
dblissmn said:
This nonsense with saving five cents a machine by having an ice-cream machine automatically apply enough thermal paste to fill a two-scoop cone
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You obviously have not looked at iFixits pictures because they don't show anything like that.


aurichie said:
Interesting article:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...terworld/news/feed+(Latest+from+Computerworld)
Among the findings were an unlocked ZIF, stripped screw near subwoofer enclosure, and unusual amounts of thermal paste applied to both the CPU and GPU.
Click to expand...


Computerworld copied that foolishness from iFixit. IFixit says a lot of things to get attention. Even they only said the thermal paste may or may not be a problem. I also didn't think it was that much from the pictures.

Don't take anything Computerworld says seriously. They just copy things from other web sites and try to sensationalize it in order to get pageviews and sell ads. Which is also the business model of most tech web sites.
 
DarwinOSX said:
Don't take anything Computerworld says seriously. They just copy things from other web sites and try to sensationalize it in order to get pageviews and sell ads. Which is also the business model of most tech web sites.
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Now now, it's not nice to group all these tech websites under the same banner, although there are some sites that are just brutal for this *cough*gizmodo*cough*
 
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