Made-in-China: It Might be Expensive, But It's Still Junk

One of the downsides of made-in-China stuff is that, while it might be cheap, it's still junk. It's just that, ten years ago, in general you only got junk if you were buying the same.

In the past week, I've had the following items die on me:

a) My iPhone headset.

b) An adapter plug to use a conventional headset with my iPhone.

c) A Logitech wireless mouse.

d) A wireless router.

None of these items were cheap off-brand knock-offs. They were all either relatively high-end products or accessories. None of them was much more than a year old (the router, I believe, was the oldest item at thirteen months).

The interesting thing is that, for the most part, I replaced these with more or less identical items. Indeed - I drove literally minutes ahead of the snowstorm which blanketed the Lower Mainland in order to replace my iPhone headset at the AT&T store in Bellingham, WA (yes, I realize that this is probably further evidence that I'm deranged, but I'm cool with that). The mouse, I bought another Logitech mouse - but actually went up to one of their VX Revolution models.

But, for the most part, that was because of a lack of a reasonable alternative.

My point isn't just to whine - it's that there's a market opening here. If someone were to manufacture products of a deliberately superior quality - and to advertise touting their relaibility at fairly reasonable prices - I would pay a premium.

Indeed, I'm in the market to consolidate my mess of computers (three in use at present) into a single unit, for reasons of portability. I'm looking at either getting one of the current-generation MacBook Pro's refurbished from Apple, or waiting for the Penryn-based Pro's to ship. But, frankly, as an avid reader of Apple forums, I'm a little concerned about the generation-after-generation reliability problems that we've seen in the Pro's (everything in the first gen, and all sorts of LED-related fun in the present gen). The result is that I'm thinking of a T62 ThinkPad as an alternative which, despite also being Chinese-made, seems to have a much better track record so far as reliability is concerned.

Though, I don't think that will happen - since I'm kind of in love with the MacBook Pro. More than kind-of, actually. I want a brand-new one as badly as... Well, I'll just leave it at that.

Of course, the biggest part of the manufacturing problem is that the Chinese are able to work unbelievably cheaply becuase they've replicated in an economic sense their traditional approach to warfare - the human wave. When you have a lot of people and don't care too much about their living conditions (don't have to care, for that matter) you can simply throw people into producing notebook computers - or at machine gun nests - and eventually numbers will tell, unless technology offsets mass.

And there's where the West's real chance lies. Human waves aren't terribly effective against people with fully automatic weapons. "For we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not," said the British a century ago. That's the real secret to beating back the Chinese economic threat - we need the economic equivilant of a Maxim gun.