15 ms·

I worked in, and around OEM electronics since 2007. I've seen many guys like Tim Cook, most worse off ones. He squeezes suppliers, and know what he is doing.

I worked in, and around OEM electronics since 2007. I've seen many guys like Tim Cook, most worse off ones. He squeezes suppliers, and know what he is doing. Others squeeze suppliers, and don't know what they are doing. On one of my first jobs, I've been witness to one such negotiations down to single cents, and microns of plastic for a few million units customized charger order. The order was such a whopper for a small sourcing agency, that higher ups were willing to do just anything to not to spook the client. Our guys quickly understood that the consultant guy doing negotiations on behalf of the client was a round idiot with a level of engineering knowledge of a first year dropout. He kept insisting on completely bizarre design changes, and ridiculous cost cutting on design like using 2 cheaper through hole diodes in parallel instead of one a cent more expensive (did not believe my ears, the guy failed EE101 right here,) dispensing with NTC inrush limiters, removing safety caps (he did not know what they are for) and asked us to redo the mold 6! times in order to save some grams of plastic per run. We managed to at least push back on safety critical parts, on a point that it will fail the certification. Many years later I found out that the design of the first Kindle charger exactly matched the one we did in everything, but having an extra label. And 5 years ago I learned that Kindles had multiple issues with melting chargers, and safety recalls. 9 out of 10 companies in the supply chain will just shoot themselves in the foot if they go on doing it like that. Nobody will point how unreasonable your demands are if you are a giant multinational corporation, moreover so in China. If you do this, and don't know yourself if you are asking a for something stupid, who will know? No one will.

sharkweek 6y ago
He made you redo the molds 720 times? That’s insanity!
baybal2 6y ago
I recalled that when in 2015, working for another sourcing shop working for likes of BestBuy/Futureshop/Target/London Drugs I was asked to tear down few chargers for them. I found that diodes in parallel are surprisingly common around the industry. This is such a thing which you are pretty much told on day 1 of any electronics course that it is impossible to not to know. My only thinkable conclusion was that people keep doing it on purpose. Other extreme cost cutting measures I saw were things like LEDs being used in double role as a diode. Wire wound around PCB used as inductor. Plug pegs being directly soldered to the PCB. Near paper thin plastic with holes from molding defects. Through hole components being soldered to each other. Flybacks without feedback. A 555 coaxed into use in a charger circuit. You cannot come with any of that unknowingly, nor will you find any of that crap on the open market easily even in China. It's pretty much an engineering equivalent of a "controlled flight into terrain," a direct result of suppliers being consciously directed into "stripping to the last cent" of the products by such unwitting buyers.
- andrewem 6y ago
  I had to look up why not to put diodes in parallel, and here’s an answer: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/6151/is-paralleling-diodes-a-bad-idea https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/6151/is-para...
  - taneq 6y ago
    Everyone's talking about negative temperature coefficients there. I thought it was more to do with diodes having a roughly constant voltage drop in the first place, meaning if you put two diodes with different voltage drops in parallel, the one with the lower drop would steal most or all of the current from the start?
- raverbashing 6y ago
  The "diodes in parallel" thing sounds like cargo-culting and lack of knowledge beyond the basic stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if reference circuits would have the double diode. Sad, but not surprised.
HappyDreamer 6y ago
> [If you don't know yourself] if you are asking a for something stupid, who will know? No one will. Makes me think I could intentionally ask for 1 or 2 stupid things, and see if the supplier tells me about it?
- ido 6y ago
  Sounds like a variation of that rock band asking for a bowl of only brown m&m from the venue - at risk of voiding the contract if not provided - in the middle of their safety requirements document (if they didn't give them brown m&ms they know they didn't read the document throughout).
  - HappyDreamer 6y ago
    Yes! That rock band came to my mind, having read about them here at HN. But I couldn't remember the name (Van Halen, see below) or "brown m&m". Now, because of your reply, I found this old HN post: "Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754334
cogman10 6y ago
This stuff is why USB-C PD scares me. You've got these manufactures that are struggling to make basic AC->DC inverters and now you want to throw on a negotiation step? Yeah, not going to end well for these cost cutting idiots. There are going to be destroyed devices and fires because some idiot decides "Just hard wire 20v and be done with it!"
- baybal2 6y ago
  Some do exactly that, but worse, horror stories of capacitive droppers being sold as iphone "cube" chargers seem to be 100% true.
  - jwr 6y ago
    Non-isolated? That's grounds for reporting to the authorities and an immediate recall.
- spoonjim 6y ago
  I only use Apple chargers in my house, even for non Apple devices. I’m not saying Apple is the only quality charger, but I have no real methodology to assess the quality of any other brand.
  - throwaway4485we 6y ago
    >I have no real methodology to assess the quality of any other brand But then how did you assess the quality of Apple's chargers? Can the same methodology not be applied then to other brands as well?
    - Judgmentality 6y ago
      Nobody else has Apple's resources for supply management, nor are they as large a target for getting sued - Apple has the ability and incentive to sell safe products.
      - 6y ago
yudlejoza 6y ago
> On one of my first jobs, I've been witness to... > ...years later I found out that the design of the first Kindle charger exactly matched... So your employer's client was Amazon?
- baybal2 6y ago
  It was some inconspicuous sourcing company, may well been their front co, or maybe an actual sourcing agent working for them. I don't believe they could've reused the design for some other client.
yourapostasy 6y ago
I would like a named list of such buyers. Not their employers. The actual natural person names. So I know which clients to decline outright based upon the name of the buyer I'm working with, if I find out they are anywhere in the chain of procurement during negotiations. I have happily told buyers "no" on numerous occasions (there is an art to how to decline a customer's request, or to decline the customer themselves). Warren Buffett was right: knowing when to judiciously say "yes" is a key factor in managing your time.
numpad0 6y ago
> using 2 cheaper through hole diodes in parallel instead of one a cent more expensive Just an idea, would it be possible to ask suppliers to jack up prices of THT power diodes so price follows forward current rating?
- cwilkes 6y ago
  That’s an interesting idea. Instead of treating the supplier as an enemy bring them on to your side with an offer of “if this part fails less than 1% of the time we’ll pay you $X more per part” Right now the only incentive they have is to give you a part that just barely won’t break for the absolute cheapest amount. As a side benefit this would weed out the bad suppliers and the good ones will seek you out.
- baybal2 6y ago
  The guy came with his own prices, and said only buy passives from these companies.
trustdragon 6y ago
Eh, the game goes both ways tho. Factories love to feign innocence over defects and dispute penalties and commonly drop QC themselves and then baulk at redoing. Everybody is under pressure and there's angels and demons on both sides.
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
If only the executives' salaries were scrutinized this closely. If someone is telling you about sacrificing safety to save a lone cent they are insane or hopelessly inept at their job. On almost any profit margin imaginable. Sell a million of these for $88 and you have saved only $10,000 on $88 million in sales. I don't know the Kindle profit margin but I'm going to guess it is quite a bit. One court case about the charger catching fire would eat that $10,000.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Charger blocks are not $88 retail let alone BOM. 1 cent in BOM translates to 5-7c in MSRP if I recall correctly. The charger itself is probably a dollar or two so you’re looking at 2-5% of the total charger cost. Maybe not a talent thing on the part of the engineer (although could be contributory) so much as getting pressure from management to cut BOM across the board without management specifying any kind of threshold requirement. Obviously still ridiculous when talking about charger safety but it’s important to remember we only see one side of the story here. Who knows what actually happened. I’ve worked with talented EE engineers on the client side complaining about how the contractor fucked up a board layout, wired things up incorrectly, or swapped out for cheaper “equivalent” parts that were out of spec in some incorrect way.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Chargers used to be way more expensive, proprietary ones in particular. Branded siemens, and ericsson chargers for phones were $100+ circa 2001
    - vlovich123 6y ago
      That's true but you have to look at shipped volume & BOM cost (bill of materials), not MSRP from a charging block 20 years ago. If this charging block was from the Kindle, you're looking at significantly higher volume & several years of advances that drive the cost down. Additionally, since everyone has shifted to stock USB chargers, all chargers have gotten drastically cheaper due to scaling. You can buy a wall USB (C or A) charger for a few $ MSRP which means it costs like 20-50 cents for the components that go into it.
jacquesm 6y ago
> like using 2 cheaper through hole diodes in parallel instead of one a cent more expensive Well, technically, once the first one burned out he still had a spare ;) You should have insisted on current limiting resistors in series :) On another note, I can see a small business in selling matched pairs of diodes...
- raverbashing 6y ago
  > On another note, I can see a small business in selling matched pairs of diodes... Hah but that will make it cost 0.0005 more per unit, can't have that
MaanuAir 6y ago
Softwares suffers from a similar pattern. Think security issues. Indeed, any kind of specialized skills suffer from the same problem, when you want to cut costs. You can only get what you paid for. (and I’m not saying paying for is a sufficient guarantee either...).
kens 6y ago
Dispensing with "unnecessary" components is called Muntzing, after Muntz, a TV salesman in the 1940s and 50s. He reduced costs by cutting out components from a TV until it stopped working, to find the minimum number of components required. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing
- alxlaz 6y ago
  Yeah, what parent is describing isn't muntzing, but the simple act of being dense in a setting where nobody can say it: > He kept insisting on completely bizarre design changes, and ridiculous cost cutting on design like using 2 cheaper through hole diodes in parallel instead of one a cent more expensive (did not believe my ears, the guy failed EE101 right here,) dispensing with NTC inrush limiters, removing safety caps (he did not know what they are for) and asked us to redo the mold 6! times in order to save some grams of plastic per run. I've seen this happening plenty of times, too. The higher-ups in many consumer (and even non-consumer!) companies are 100% clueless about these things, but they "know" that Chinese OEMs try to "rip you off" on designs, so they will demand their staff to squeeze them (and will promptly fire or replace anyone who dares tell them that a design is actually okay). So every once in a while one of these smart guys will show up and make completely stupid demands. And explaining someone who doesn't understand basic electrical engineering concepts just why these demands are stupid is completely unproductive -- they don't just lack an understanding of the jargon, they lack an understanding of the most basic concepts. It's akin to trying to explain someone who doesn't know what a for loop is why you're using a hash table in a place where "a simple array would suffice".
908B64B197 6y ago
> I've seen many guys like Tim Cook, most worse off ones. [...] He squeezes suppliers, and know what he is doing. [...] Others squeeze suppliers, and don't know what they are doing. [...] 9 out of 10 companies in the supply chain will just shoot themselves in the foot if they go on doing it like that. Apple is probably the most cargo-culted company out there, after Google maybe. The number of "Steve Jobs wanabes" that I met who didn't have the billions nor the string of successful products behind them was staggering. I have no doubt Tim Cook is cargo-culted as much as Jobs was. For anyone attempting this, keep in mind he built a team of world class experts around him.

sharkweek 6y ago

He made you redo the molds 720 times? That’s insanity!

baybal2 6y ago

I recalled that when in 2015, working for another sourcing shop working for likes of BestBuy/Futureshop/Target/London Drugs I was asked to tear down few chargers for them. I found that diodes in parallel are surprisingly common around the industry. This is such a thing which you are pretty much told on day 1 of any electronics course that it is impossible to not to know. My only thinkable conclusion was that people keep doing it on purpose. Other extreme cost cutting measures I saw were things like LEDs being used in double role as a diode. Wire wound around PCB used as inductor. Plug pegs being directly soldered to the PCB. Near paper thin plastic with holes from molding defects. Through hole components being soldered to each other. Flybacks without feedback. A 555 coaxed into use in a charger circuit. You cannot come with any of that unknowingly, nor will you find any of that crap on the open market easily even in China. It's pretty much an engineering equivalent of a "controlled flight into terrain," a direct result of suppliers being consciously directed into "stripping to the last cent" of the products by such unwitting buyers.

andrewem 6y ago
I had to look up why not to put diodes in parallel, and here’s an answer: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/6151/is-paralleling-diodes-a-bad-idea https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/6151/is-para...
- taneq 6y ago
  Everyone's talking about negative temperature coefficients there. I thought it was more to do with diodes having a roughly constant voltage drop in the first place, meaning if you put two diodes with different voltage drops in parallel, the one with the lower drop would steal most or all of the current from the start?
raverbashing 6y ago
The "diodes in parallel" thing sounds like cargo-culting and lack of knowledge beyond the basic stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if reference circuits would have the double diode. Sad, but not surprised.

HappyDreamer 6y ago

> [If you don't know yourself] if you are asking a for something stupid, who will know? No one will. Makes me think I could intentionally ask for 1 or 2 stupid things, and see if the supplier tells me about it?

ido 6y ago
Sounds like a variation of that rock band asking for a bowl of only brown m&m from the venue - at risk of voiding the contract if not provided - in the middle of their safety requirements document (if they didn't give them brown m&ms they know they didn't read the document throughout).
- HappyDreamer 6y ago
  Yes! That rock band came to my mind, having read about them here at HN. But I couldn't remember the name (Van Halen, see below) or "brown m&m". Now, because of your reply, I found this old HN post: "Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754334

cogman10 6y ago

This stuff is why USB-C PD scares me. You've got these manufactures that are struggling to make basic AC->DC inverters and now you want to throw on a negotiation step? Yeah, not going to end well for these cost cutting idiots. There are going to be destroyed devices and fires because some idiot decides "Just hard wire 20v and be done with it!"

baybal2 6y ago
Some do exactly that, but worse, horror stories of capacitive droppers being sold as iphone "cube" chargers seem to be 100% true.
- jwr 6y ago
  Non-isolated? That's grounds for reporting to the authorities and an immediate recall.
spoonjim 6y ago
I only use Apple chargers in my house, even for non Apple devices. I’m not saying Apple is the only quality charger, but I have no real methodology to assess the quality of any other brand.
- throwaway4485we 6y ago
  >I have no real methodology to assess the quality of any other brand But then how did you assess the quality of Apple's chargers? Can the same methodology not be applied then to other brands as well?
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    Nobody else has Apple's resources for supply management, nor are they as large a target for getting sued - Apple has the ability and incentive to sell safe products.
    - 6y ago

yudlejoza 6y ago

> On one of my first jobs, I've been witness to... > ...years later I found out that the design of the first Kindle charger exactly matched... So your employer's client was Amazon?

baybal2 6y ago
It was some inconspicuous sourcing company, may well been their front co, or maybe an actual sourcing agent working for them. I don't believe they could've reused the design for some other client.

yourapostasy 6y ago

I would like a named list of such buyers. Not their employers. The actual natural person names. So I know which clients to decline outright based upon the name of the buyer I'm working with, if I find out they are anywhere in the chain of procurement during negotiations. I have happily told buyers "no" on numerous occasions (there is an art to how to decline a customer's request, or to decline the customer themselves). Warren Buffett was right: knowing when to judiciously say "yes" is a key factor in managing your time.

numpad0 6y ago

> using 2 cheaper through hole diodes in parallel instead of one a cent more expensive Just an idea, would it be possible to ask suppliers to jack up prices of THT power diodes so price follows forward current rating?

cwilkes 6y ago
That’s an interesting idea. Instead of treating the supplier as an enemy bring them on to your side with an offer of “if this part fails less than 1% of the time we’ll pay you $X more per part” Right now the only incentive they have is to give you a part that just barely won’t break for the absolute cheapest amount. As a side benefit this would weed out the bad suppliers and the good ones will seek you out.
baybal2 6y ago
The guy came with his own prices, and said only buy passives from these companies.

trustdragon 6y ago

Eh, the game goes both ways tho. Factories love to feign innocence over defects and dispute penalties and commonly drop QC themselves and then baulk at redoing. Everybody is under pressure and there's angels and demons on both sides.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago

If only the executives' salaries were scrutinized this closely. If someone is telling you about sacrificing safety to save a lone cent they are insane or hopelessly inept at their job. On almost any profit margin imaginable. Sell a million of these for $88 and you have saved only $10,000 on $88 million in sales. I don't know the Kindle profit margin but I'm going to guess it is quite a bit. One court case about the charger catching fire would eat that $10,000.

vlovich123 6y ago
Charger blocks are not $88 retail let alone BOM. 1 cent in BOM translates to 5-7c in MSRP if I recall correctly. The charger itself is probably a dollar or two so you’re looking at 2-5% of the total charger cost. Maybe not a talent thing on the part of the engineer (although could be contributory) so much as getting pressure from management to cut BOM across the board without management specifying any kind of threshold requirement. Obviously still ridiculous when talking about charger safety but it’s important to remember we only see one side of the story here. Who knows what actually happened. I’ve worked with talented EE engineers on the client side complaining about how the contractor fucked up a board layout, wired things up incorrectly, or swapped out for cheaper “equivalent” parts that were out of spec in some incorrect way.
- baybal2 6y ago
  Chargers used to be way more expensive, proprietary ones in particular. Branded siemens, and ericsson chargers for phones were $100+ circa 2001
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    That's true but you have to look at shipped volume & BOM cost (bill of materials), not MSRP from a charging block 20 years ago. If this charging block was from the Kindle, you're looking at significantly higher volume & several years of advances that drive the cost down. Additionally, since everyone has shifted to stock USB chargers, all chargers have gotten drastically cheaper due to scaling. You can buy a wall USB (C or A) charger for a few $ MSRP which means it costs like 20-50 cents for the components that go into it.

jacquesm 6y ago

> like using 2 cheaper through hole diodes in parallel instead of one a cent more expensive Well, technically, once the first one burned out he still had a spare ;) You should have insisted on current limiting resistors in series :) On another note, I can see a small business in selling matched pairs of diodes...

raverbashing 6y ago
> On another note, I can see a small business in selling matched pairs of diodes... Hah but that will make it cost 0.0005 more per unit, can't have that

MaanuAir 6y ago

Softwares suffers from a similar pattern. Think security issues. Indeed, any kind of specialized skills suffer from the same problem, when you want to cut costs. You can only get what you paid for. (and I’m not saying paying for is a sufficient guarantee either...).

kens 6y ago

Dispensing with "unnecessary" components is called Muntzing, after Muntz, a TV salesman in the 1940s and 50s. He reduced costs by cutting out components from a TV until it stopped working, to find the minimum number of components required. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing

alxlaz 6y ago
Yeah, what parent is describing isn't muntzing, but the simple act of being dense in a setting where nobody can say it: > He kept insisting on completely bizarre design changes, and ridiculous cost cutting on design like using 2 cheaper through hole diodes in parallel instead of one a cent more expensive (did not believe my ears, the guy failed EE101 right here,) dispensing with NTC inrush limiters, removing safety caps (he did not know what they are for) and asked us to redo the mold 6! times in order to save some grams of plastic per run. I've seen this happening plenty of times, too. The higher-ups in many consumer (and even non-consumer!) companies are 100% clueless about these things, but they "know" that Chinese OEMs try to "rip you off" on designs, so they will demand their staff to squeeze them (and will promptly fire or replace anyone who dares tell them that a design is actually okay). So every once in a while one of these smart guys will show up and make completely stupid demands. And explaining someone who doesn't understand basic electrical engineering concepts just why these demands are stupid is completely unproductive -- they don't just lack an understanding of the jargon, they lack an understanding of the most basic concepts. It's akin to trying to explain someone who doesn't know what a for loop is why you're using a hash table in a place where "a simple array would suffice".

908B64B197 6y ago

> I've seen many guys like Tim Cook, most worse off ones. [...] He squeezes suppliers, and know what he is doing. [...] Others squeeze suppliers, and don't know what they are doing. [...] 9 out of 10 companies in the supply chain will just shoot themselves in the foot if they go on doing it like that. Apple is probably the most cargo-culted company out there, after Google maybe. The number of "Steve Jobs wanabes" that I met who didn't have the billions nor the string of successful products behind them was staggering. I have no doubt Tim Cook is cargo-culted as much as Jobs was. For anyone attempting this, keep in mind he built a team of world class experts around him.