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Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

The absurd example in the second paragraph put me off, so I didn't really find it in me to read the argument thoroughly. But if the premise is that a single man can "come up with an idea" and magically produce an ipod with comparable personal effort, and no reliance of a third world factory economy -- as an author can come up with a book -- then I don't think the author of the article has the required connection to reality to discuss economics at all.

Earlier today I came across this, which may (or may not) be an interesting counter-point -- or at least make a meta-point: "Exposing the false prophets of social transformation": https://opendemocracy.net/transformation/nicole-aschoff/expo...

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Did the iPod require a "third world factory economy", or was that merely the best way to make it when it was developed?

Go back to the original Apple II and subsequent products, they were per memory and Wikipedia all made in the US until the late 1990s. The IBM PC was originally manufactured by SCI Systems in Huntsville, Alabama.

Woohoo -- thanks for calling out my previous employer, which also built Macs for a good while (in Colorado).

What a lot of folks don't seem to understand about "third world factory economies" is that the prototyping and initial product runs are still frequently done in the west. Some EMS companies, like Flex, even have hardware incubators in Silicon Valley (google "Lab IX" sometime); all of them offer JDM & ODM services, too.

Well if they doubled the price of iPods in order to manufacture them inside the United States, no one would buy an iPod and the product would fail.

That's not to say American manufacturing would cause the price to double, just pointing out that where you manufacture something is an important part of the product planning process.

I believe the fact that this factory economy is third world is very much besides the point that e12e was trying to make.

Paraphrasing, I think the point is that writing a book and building an iPod are vastly different tasks, and immensely so. A better criticism to what e12e was trying to imply is perhaps that Rowling certainly wouldn't be rich if it weren't for a network of publishers. Like Jobs, she depended on other people for channeling the income she received to her. (Of course, the difference in how that happened is still huge.)

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