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50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced in India shows Apple’s challenge

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Re: 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced in India shows Apple’s challenge

#121

Post by kalesh »

nequo wrote: post #94
kalesh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience. I was working on my clothing startup with initial investment of about ~$30,000 USD. INDIA - Met at least 12-15 manufactures in India (medium to large scale, $1m ARR to $50m ARR). Only a 1-2 of these had any catalogs or samples of different fabric compositions. Most wanted an advance to kick-start the process. Sampling was a total failure with three of these. CHINA - Contacted about 10 manufactures…

Why did you end up going with a Peruvian supplier instead of a Chinese one?

Peruvian supplier could produce the pima cotton fabric.

Re: 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced in India shows Apple’s challenge

#122

Post by grantsch »

SilverBirch wrote: post #98
kalesh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about being advanced. It's about keeping promises & being honest. It might take a whole generation to fix this.

Overpromising and underdelivering is what you do when you can't meet the expectations and you need to try and get the business anyway. What's the alternative? Honestly promise a product no one wants to buy. Once you've manufactured a billion widgets you no longer need to overpromise and underdeliver. It's very similar to the silicon valley "fake it till you make it" attitude.

Yeah or maybe you could just be honest and not cheat. That's a good option too.

Re: 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced in India shows Apple’s challenge

#123

Post by [deleted] »

crote wrote: post #102
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am an entrepreneur & a small business owner in India. I did a small manufacturing in China & was blown away by their professionalism. The article mentions - `Chinese suppliers had a totally different attitude, aiming to exceed the Cupertino company’s expectations` - this is so true. This varies massively from one CM to the next. If you can get your foot in the door at the higher tier CMs, the professionalism and…

I've got the same experience. Chinese manufacturers can do absolutely amazing work - provided you can get them to care. In general they'll manufacture exactly what you ask them to. They are also very happy to do manual labour to get the job done. But for most stuff, don't expect too much feedback. Asking for feedback on a design to optimize it for production didn't really produce anything useful, and they manufacture…

[deleted]

Re: 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced in India shows Apple’s challenge

#124

Post by Oxidation »

valdiorn wrote: post #52
User23 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States and Europe still have the capability to make these casings, but it's "too expensive." I imagine so is Japan for that matter.

When I was looking at machining in China (I built some aluminium guitar prototypes) the cost between European fabricators and China wasn't just significant - it was an order of magnitude. I got a handful of absolutely impeccable prototypes from my Chinese manufacturers, for about 350 USD a piece. The few UK machine shops that even bothered answering my emails and phonecalls quoted about 10-15k per unit.

> The few UK machine shops that even bothered answering my emails and phonecalls

Sounds familiar. Just getting someone local to take your money is like pulling teeth sometimes. Eventually went with someone halfway across the the country mostly because they actually bothered to reply at all.

Re: 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced in India shows Apple’s challenge

#125

Post by serf »

kalesh wrote: post #21

I am an entrepreneur & a small business owner in India. I did a small manufacturing in China & was blown away by their professionalism. The article mentions - `Chinese suppliers had a totally different attitude, aiming to exceed the Cupertino company’s expectations` - this is so true. In India, most manufacturing companies or businesses are trying to sell what they have or can produce (without any attention to detail…

>I never visited China & the manufacturing went perfect.

it's about the type of manufacturing that these groups are used for.

My father took his bicycle part manufacturing to China in the early 90s and had his IP and design-work ripped off and duplicated to the point of making his formerly successful business largely insolvent -- this taught him the value of keeping the assembly and finishing work in-house, but unfortunately that lesson came too late for his ventures.

Same story with an exercise equipment MFG that I did design work for more recently. The joke at the table was "OK, we can get the bulk manufactured for X in (Chinese province)... but how long until we see these for sale on Taobao?"

Re: 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced in India shows Apple’s challenge

#126

Post by serf »

grantsch wrote: post #122
SilverBirch wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overpromising and underdelivering is what you do when you can't meet the expectations and you need to try and get the business anyway. What's the alternative? Honestly promise a product no one wants to buy. Once you've manufactured a billion widgets you no longer need to overpromise and underdeliver. It's very similar to the silicon valley "fake it till you make it" attitude.

Yeah or maybe you could just be honest and not cheat. That's a good option too.

as someone who has ran a machine shop, that's lovely -- but rare.

95 percent of the shops I have known in the past or worked with currently would sell you their ability to do something while simultaneous upgrading their equipment to match the moment the PO is signed off on.

If fab/machine/mfg shops didn't take on work that was beyond their capability then the smaller groups would starve to death immediately, being unable to use the larger contracts to facilitate upgrades.

The trick is to find a shop operator that is aware of their rate of capability upgrade and turn-around time, that way the delivery dates aren't inaccurate even if the shop capabilities need to be 'tuned' (new machines bought).

Re: 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced in India shows Apple’s challenge

#127

Post by MPlus88 »

rocknor wrote: post #118
MPlus88 wrote: post #73

"It’s likely that similar issues will arise with new Apple suppliers in other countries too." Not at all Apple. Move to Vietnam and you can duplicate the success you have in China. Indians are only good at talking a good talk.

> Indians are only good at talking a good talk. Citation needed.

Angela Saini in her book "Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World" bragged that India is a up and coming scientific superpower. That book was published a decade ago.

Re: 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced in India shows Apple’s challenge

#128

Post by ElevenLathe »

grantsch wrote: post #122
SilverBirch wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overpromising and underdelivering is what you do when you can't meet the expectations and you need to try and get the business anyway. What's the alternative? Honestly promise a product no one wants to buy. Once you've manufactured a billion widgets you no longer need to overpromise and underdeliver. It's very similar to the silicon valley "fake it till you make it" attitude.

Yeah or maybe you could just be honest and not cheat. That's a good option too.

I'm not sure it really is. Dial your time machine back to Victorian London and I bet you would find lots of similarly-run factories. As another poster pointed out, the choices are essentially 1) be honest that you are kind of a bad factory, and can't really produce anything that people want or 2) pretend that you are a great factory, get some business, learn and iterate. Eventually you can honestly promise high quality, but you have to survive that far first.

Re: 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced in India shows Apple’s challenge

#129

Post by 1024core »

blobbers wrote: post #46
tnorthcutt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no cars or electronics, or chip fabs in this country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Motors

Anyone want to vouch for their great experience driving a Tata car? Not exported outside the middle east and India. Looks like they sold 5 of them in Europe in 2016. https://carsalesbase.com/europe-tata/#:~:text=Tata%20cars%20... .

You do know that Tata owns Jaguar and Land Rover... right?

Re: 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced in India shows Apple’s challenge

#130

Post by MichaelZuo »

smoldesu wrote: post #34
qqtt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Apple is drastically underestimating the scale and sophistication required to move their manufacturing? Do you think Tim Cook made a strategic error here, owing partially to his lack of understanding of the involvement of these processes? There will be growing pains moving and scaling manufacturing anywhere. The fact that there are early obstacles and hurdles does not mean we should simply throw up our h…

> Do you think Tim Cook made a strategic error here Honestly, yeah. Doubling down on China was a mistake, and now there are no easy outs for the hardware side of things. Apple tried manufacturing the Mac Pro in the US, but I doubt the numbers on that added up in the US' favor. Correcting course is the right move to make now, but people were right when they called Apple's Chinese supply chain a deal with the devil. No…

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