Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuatoru | Hacker News Reader

The other point that is completely missing is that a factory does not exist in splendid isolation.

If there's a problem with the FR-4 circuit boards, or the pick and place machines are misbehaving, or some of the chip-scale components that are being placed are faulty, or the wiring harness is wrong, or the molds for the body of the product need modifying because the product is cracking...

... it's much easier to deal with your supplier just down the road than one across the world.

These days stuff is manufactured in China because (the) stuff (that makes up the stuff) is manufactured in China.

Additive manufacturing is still too slow and expensive for mass production. As a recent Ars Technica article put it, it's fine for supercars but not for cars.

View on HN

Yes and the solution is to have a warehouse of stuff that makes the stuff close by. But you probably need lots of manufactures to make that warehouse make sense. etc.

When I was doing my master's degree I would bike down to Rotterdam where the largest importer of piping supplies in Europe was. I just wandered off the street and every part imaginable they could just pull off the shelf for me. I was converting all kinds of wild stuff, from metric to imperial and vice versa, there are about a billion different thread standards and manufacturing standards, they had convertors for everything. And cheap stuff to go the distance.

The funny thing was, I didn't know it was there, there was an Italian researcher visiting that told me about it. However, he said that in Italy where he did his research he needed to travel over an hour to get to something similar. After that, I realized there were many pieces of my project that had large warehouses like this in Rotterdam due to the harbour. They often had tiny little windows with people with plus 20/30 years of experience, just taking orders, and coming up with solutions for your problems with a list of parts that would get you there. Then you would walk away with 50 bits, and a bill that was less than 40 euros. Madness.

I've listened to few interviews with people manufacturing in China and "you have to have someone on the ground there" repeated in pretty much all of them.

I was told by people that work for FAANG that each company reserves some number of first class seats for the daily SFO to China flights specifically for this reason.

If there an issue, some engineer responsible for the part can be in the factory in under 24h

only 1 of faang manufactures consumer-facing hardware? could see why AAPL does this, but the others?

Meta (Quest 2/3/Pro, Meta Portal), Google (Pixel, home automation hardware, much more), Amazon (Echo, Kindle, Ring), and Microsoft (Surface lineup and much more) all manufacture hardware.

ah point taken

though I assume some of these are made by OEMs

> though I assume some of these are made by OEMs

They are.

The "no, _they're_ the idiots" rivalry between engineer / manufacturing is almost as old as time. A design team almost never gets to just "hand off" the files to the manufacturing side without some amount of issue/fix iteration happening.

It's not just the physical engineering of a device, though. If the $thing that is responsible for QA/Test or even programming keys into $widget goes down, the factory has to stop and that's _expensive_ so you get the guy that designed it out there to fix it _asap_.

I don't think you know what those companies do...

Manufacturing ecosystems, basically

Reply on news.ycombinator.com