Sunday, January 29, 2012

If an iPhone was in my budget.....

.....this, along with other things I've learned about Apple product reliability, would dissuade me.  Now there are of course the moral issues that I thought that we as a nation had overcome--slavery, nasty abuse of workers, and such--but there is also the issue of "what kind of work are Apple's assemblers going to do with no sleep and minimal food?"   I know that on this side of the pond, a lot of things happen to product quality when workers go beyond 8-9 hours of work a day, and none of them are good.  So if you wonder why you just got a new iPhone under warranty--or for that matter any of a host of electronics now made in China--you know know one big reason why.

(I personally keep boxes and receipts for all electronics I purchase for at least a year--and one particular piece of electro-mechanical genius from General Electric--a clock radio/CD player-- appears to have helped that company to decide to leave the business altogether....I ended up getting four of them on warranty returns because they didn't bother to balance the motor/bearings that spun the CD)

Now of course, Deming's Law--85% of quality problems start in management--still holds for a very simple reason; you can bet your bottom dollar that the decision to get those workers out of bed didn't happen in the worker dormitories.

3 comments:

Elspeth said...

Your first link doesn't work, Bubba.

I posted on this too, and got lots of comments explaining to me (as if I didn't know LOL) that I was looking at this through an uniquely American prism.

Still, something about it bothered me enough that I won't be buying an iPhone.

O/T: Florida's primary is tomorrow. Gingrich is looking good, and you KNOW how much that bothers me. Even more than the tea and biscuit 12 hour shifts at the Apple plant.

Bike Bubba said...

Thanks--Fixed!

You know, I find myself setting boundaries at my work more and more, and I am starting to blame folks like those at Apple. I would assume that Secret Agent Man may be doing so, too, for a lot of the same reasons.

If it were possible, Lincoln, Douglass, and Wilberforce would be spinning in their graves over this.

Mark said...

Any follow-up here to acknowledge the reports of Apple's reforms at their companies?

What type of phone do you have? If it's a top of the line gadget, what did it cost? With a contract?

I have a _new_ iPhone 4 that I got w/o contract.