The quality is no different. The companies like Apple design their products to the standards they set, with the components they specify, and do quality control to ensure they meet the standards they set. iPads and such are not junk, or more shoddy, coming from China. Any obsolescence is due to the speedy advance of technology, driven as usual by the demand for more powerful devices with more memory and longer battery life.
(I still have an original iPad, a 10-year-old iPod, and a iPhone 3GS. I must say, they iPod still works although I hardly use it - it’s held up better than competing MP3 players. The iPhone is great; it’s unlocked and I use it with local SIM cards when I travel.)
The big difference is cost - labour is one quarter to one tenth the cost of here in North America, with a lot less of the pesky labour laws that make business annoying over here - and of contracted out, those problems are someone else’s. If we use the very rough rule of thumb that labor is half the cost of manufacturing over here, then by using the same components but one quarter the labour cost, you can shave 35% or more off the cost. The question is, why is there any manufacturing left over here?
Same with Nike and The Gap. They design and specify the materials, and do quality control assessments on the finished product. It’s unlikely the goods would be any different from local factories. The problem is - when you contract it all out to jobbers - you rely on them for quality and honesty and on-time delivery.
Where the reputation of China comes from - two things: frauds and fakes.
It is possible to use fraudulent materials or components, things that are not up to standards. Lulu Lemon, for example, got caught when they were dealt a substandard batch of stretchy material, making their yoga pants semi-transparent when appropriately stretched. By not having hands-on every step of the process, this slipped by causing multi-million dollar damage and no end of good punchlines. Whether the substitution error would have been more easily caught if done locally? Who knows. It obviously fooled their quality control.
Similarly, some clever chemistry guys figured out that adding melamine to a product fooled the quality control chemical tests for protein content - so a lot of milk and similar products were adulterated with melamine to improve the protein quality score. Result? A lot of dead babies in China, a lot of dead pets in the USA.
Fakes are something else altogether. There are grey market fakes and fake fakes. Grey market are items produced, probably at the same factory using the same materials as a name brand. They are likely over-production or from keeping the factory going at night and sneaking the excess out the back door. These are valuable because the normal channel imposes a MASSIVE markup on name brands. DO you really think the materials in an Air Jordan justify a price more than ten times the Wal-Mart el cheapo sneaker? Someone is getting rich, and it ain’t the Chinese. They sell pretty much the same thing under the table, people pay half the price but get the same product, everyone’s happy except Nike and Jordan. Similarly, if they are stamping out the latest DVD’s at a factory, a few extra might make it out the back door. MGM doesn’t get their cut.
OTOH, for the price they charge, Jordan has to use good materials. Fake fakes use the cheaper materials. They simply put the desirable name on sneakers, or purses, or watches, or whatever. These are the goods that give China its reputation. Prada or Coach (probably?) don’t make cheap vinyl purses that fall apart after a few months, but put their name on something that does, and someone will pay a few extra dollars for it. If the look costs more than the basic materials, there’s money to be made in fakes - and brand names have been pushing consumers to pay for the look for decades.
As for cheap and labour costs - note that most of the clothing today comes not from China, but from a plethora of third-world countries. China is well on its way to becoming a first world country, a generation or two behind Japan and close on the heels of South Korea. Even in the hinterlands, labour costs are far higher than Bangladesh or Burma or Vietnam. I have already seen articles where Chinese authorities are concerned about losing manufacturing to other countries.
Regulation and standards don’t make it impossible to work 24-7; it just means that labour laws mean you may have to deal with pesky unions since workers want a share of that windfall the corporation is raking in. Strikes could mean you don’t get the deliveries in time for Christmas. You have to deal with OSHA and keep the workplace safe, and pay a fortune for industrial accidents. Contracting out means all that is someone else’s headache, and if they don’t deliver, you don’t pay. If you’re contracting out anyway, the place that charges less than half the price to manufacture overseas will win every time.
This is the problem. Remember the garment factory that collapsed in Bangladesh? The owners didn’t force the workers in because they were heartless bastards who did not care about their workers. (that detail was irrelevant). They forced the people to keep working because they had a deadline. The have to deliver the entire job by the deadline (appropriate name). The contracts typically are either all or nothing. If they only have 90% of it done, the company has missed the contract and have 90% of a container load or ten of shirts with a brand logo sewn in, that basically have to be destroyed since they can’t easily be retailed elsewhere… the local Bangladesh producer eats the cost of materials and labour for an unfilled contract… so ignore distractions, ignore cracks in the wall, get back to work. The circumstances of the contracting out business basically force the local companies to be slave drivers.
This ignores, too, the fact that these factories pay pretty good wages. A dollar a day may not sound like much, but apparently it’s as good or better than most local work pays; and without the foreign contracts, there would not even be that.
