6 ms·

This is the second article about hardware supply from China I've read and it reads very much the same, albiet in a different niche (the other one was about SBC

• paul_n 9mo ago
  Do you happen to remember where you read that article about SBC construction? I’d be interested in reading it
  • ggm 9mo ago
    It was a HN post several years ago. I will try and find it. I think it was one of the many threads off "Bunnie Huang's Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen" because the specific incident I can't find. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=guide+shenzhen https://hn.algolia.com/?q=guide+shenzhen
    • Animats 9mo ago
      Buy the current edition here.[1] Revised by Naomi Wu. [1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/machinery-enchantress/the-new-essential-guide-to-electronics-in-shenzhen https://www.crowdsupply.com/machinery-enchantress/the-new-es...
• nomel 9mo ago
  Working with a Chinese vendors is an adversarial first relationship, where 差不多 is deeeeep in the culture (and, from my experience, tends to survive trips across the ocean). There are professional communication/training courses for working with Chinese vendors/colleagues that spell all of this out, because it's not some secret. It's just a very different culture, with high context communication (I'll let you read what the practical implications of that are elsewhere). Want to have your mind blown? Look up what it means when they say "yes", when you're explaining something. Being a low context person, I have significant and severe communication problems when working with Chinese colleagues/vendors.
  • throw3836284w 9mo ago
    chabuduo is basically fail fast, fail early with Chinese characteristics. Maybe because I was in a frat, but talking to Chinese salespeople seems very similar to talking to my frat brothers. Personally, I never really had too many issues sourcing from China because I made sure I was always introduced to a reliable partner first. And secondly, I told them when deciding on two options, choose the better quality option, regardless of price. Basically, I didn't tell them to save us much money as possible if that made all the difference.
  • sampullman 9mo ago
    I did not find this to be the case, except with a few low quality vendors we ended up dropping. It was mostly the same as anywhere else, you go talk to them in person, tour their facilities/processes, and see what else they've built. I was warned strongly about IP theft and cost cutting, but didn't find that expectation quite met reality. It may have been that our products were mostly un-copyable, and we specified everything precisely, or were just lucky.
  • myst 9mo ago
    Googled that ‘yes’ thing. Not different from my experience in other parts of the world. ‘Yes’ means ‘yes, sir’ only in the army. What is your environment?
    • Maxion 9mo ago
• rendaw 9mo ago
  So I'm curious, if you give them a really detailed specification, will they actually follow it all? If they don't, do you have any recourse? Are these small shops/fronts that are constantly coming/going like Amazon sellers, or do they have reputations?
  • throwup238 9mo ago
    > Are these small shops/fronts that are constantly coming/going like Amazon sellers, or do they have reputations? Depends on the shop. The one I use for prototyping has been around for at least 15 years with a good reputation.
    • michaelanckaert 9mo ago
      Do you mind sharing your contact / shop? Email in profile if you don't want to share publicly.
      • throwup238 9mo ago
        https://sunpe.com/ https://sunpe.com/
• starky 9mo ago
  A lot of success in working with suppliers in China (and really anywhere in Asia) is in building a relationship with them where they know exactly what your expectations are and holding them to it until they understand that it is just easiest for them to do it right to start. I've got suppliers who I can send a difficult part to and know that I'm going to get exactly what I expect, faster and cheaper than just about anyone else. It took a few years to get to that point, but these few vendors make it really hard to go with anyone else, much to the chagrin of the sourcing team who rightly recognize it a risk to rely on just a few suppliers. Once you get to a certain type of supplier you end up running into the problem where their processes are such that they won't do anything without you clearly documenting it. They simply refuse to make any assumptions on your behalf. They can be so frustrating when you are used to the other way of doing it. I simply cannot answer some questions because I'm so used to my other suppliers just doing it correctly and haven't ever asked about it.
• jasonkester 9mo ago
  That's the thing that drives me nuts about buying stuff manufactured in China. They'll make this amazing Remote Control Car, with good suspension, a battery that lasts half an hour, plenty of power, and just all around amazing. But then it'll break after a day because somebody saved 1/20th of a penny by speccing this impossibly thin wire the thickness of a human hair to hook that powerful battery to the powerful motor and inside the remote. They could have used actual wire-sized wire and had the most amazing product ever, for roughly zero more cost. (Possibly less, since surely it must cost _more_ to manufacture and solder micron-diameter wiring). It just makes no sense.
  • ebonnafoux 9mo ago
    China is a 1.4 billion people country, more than US + Europe, so it is expected that there is a wild gap between high end product and low cost there.
  • mlrtime 9mo ago
    You're not wrong, but there are 1000 of those rc cars, and maybe 20% have that feature you want, but everyone buys the cheapest because they don't know which has slightly better quality. Now go with Kyosho or Tamiya and you DO know it will be best in class, but at 10x the cost.
    • detourdog 9mo ago
      We live in an age where we can make our own inflation. We can choose between 2 products one with realistic expectations at greater cost and one that just looks like the other product but didn’t go the extra mile to ensure the product will function.
  • detourdog 9mo ago
    I felt the same thing with GE home appliances. They would last forever if someone didn’t choose to make some little plastic thing so cheap.
    • hvs 9mo ago
• thenthenthen 9mo ago
  There is an amazing book called Poorly Made in China, by Paul Midler. The title doesn’t do the book justice imho, but it offers some insights into what can go wrong and why. It was a very recognisable and enjoyable read.
• bambax 9mo ago
  That's not my experience at all. I manufactured simple objects in China some years ago (2017-2020) at scale (around 50k units) and everything went extremely well. The objects were order of magnitude simpler than in the post (no electronics and no plastic, only metal) so maybe that doesn't compare, but I never had any bad surprise from any supplier, including packaging (which can be quite complex and involve several providers), etc. Everyone will gladly send you samples (for free!) and prototypes of what you imagine (usually at cost) and if you're explicit about what you want and validate each step before the next, everything goes well. Eventually I moved on to other things for mostly bureaucratic reasons; selling objects in Europe is an administrative nightmare that's simply not worth the hassle. But the manufacturing part was not just smooth -- it was the best part of the experience. (And I never left my town and never even talked to anyone over the phone: the primary means of communication was email.) Edit: why would anyone downvote this, and so fast? If anyone thinks I'm being insincere, I have proof! ;-)
  • theodric 9mo ago
    I would reckon the simplicity of the objects and the single material helped. If you specify 304 and you get 304, they can really only cheap out on tooling, and that'll cause them pain rather than you. HN loves downvoting. It's Nerd Reddit. Don't sweat it.
    • bambax 9mo ago
      I tried many different suppliers, for the objects themselves and for the packaging (which involved 3-4 different parts); some were better than others (esp. regarding delays) but no one tried to take advantage of me. And I was just one guy from Europe making small batches: the ideal target for a scam. Yet it never happened; quite the opposite in fact. At some point given the cost of transport by air or by sea I tried train+truck. The shipment ended up stopped in Mongolia for about 3 weeks. The factory in China, which didn't have anything to do with the shipping company (except that they selected it; but it was a completely different entity) went out of their way to find out where the goods were and what was happening, and eventually made sure they were delivered to my door. > HN loves downvoting. It's Nerd Reddit. Don't sweat it. Yeah I know, I've been here a long time. But it was instantaneous and that surprised me.
• dkdbejwi383 9mo ago
  A lot of it comes down to differences between “ask” cultures and “guess” cultures, where if something is unknown we in the west may expect the person to ask for clarification, where as other cultures prefer to just guess, because doing _something_, even if it’s incorrect, is seen as better than not doing.
• crote 9mo ago
  > the cost of 5 SBC boards with pre-applied SMD is now so low, you might as well order 5 so you get at least 1 which works I've had a 90% failure rate on what was supposed to be the final prototype before production. Turns out they hand-soldered the batch because the proto run was (obviously) only a dozen units - and some parts were just too tricky to reliably hand-solder. I understand the logic as fully-automated assembly has a nontrivial startup cost, but a big reason of doing later prototypes is evaluating the manufacturing process as well. If the assembly method used doesn't match what I can expect in production runs, what's the point? Weirdly enough the batch before this was totally fine. In the end we did get a massive discount on the hand-assembled run and managed to do all the testing with the one prototype we got working with some small rework, but it still cost us quite a lot of time and money. We would've happily paid a significantly higher fee to have them just do it properly - per-prototype cost is pretty much irrelevant during development.
• moribvndvs 9mo ago
  This is generally true, volume and low cost situations exacerbate it, but it’s not limited to Chinese manufacturing. You see it everywhere. As a completely unrelated example: home remodeling. The guy I contracted did wonderful work and charged a completely fair price, but there were many parts that I hand waved at “he knows best” “he’ll pick the most sensible approach that matches the quality of the rest of project”. Wrong. Cheapest, fastest thing, using materials on hand if possible every time. The economics are obvious and it doesn’t matter to him insofar as I acquiesce or don’t notice. Why should it be any different for low cost mass manufacturing?
  • HeyLaughingBoy 9mo ago
    "It's not cheap, it's Builder Grade."
• RataNova 9mo ago
  Feels like the real skill in hardware isn't just engineering, but learning how to be absurdly literal with reality
• adolph 9mo ago
  > I've read some stuff which says the cost of 5 SBC boards with pre-applied SMD is now so low, you might as well order 5 so you get at least 1 which works. That means they will wind up working out your tolerance for failure, and produce goods to meet that: if 1 in 5 is viable, thats what they'll target. That is very rational. Each 9 in uptime or quality represents expense. The expense of moving to the next level up can't always be "shift left", but instead done at the point in the process where money can be applied. Lets say you have a process that goes right at a minimum of 20% of the time for cost of 100. The manufacturer can add QA that makes the cost 120. Is it better to trust the manufacturer at the cost of +20? Or is it better to do your own QA for 20 and gain any correct pieces above the 20%?
• jaustin 9mo ago
  Do you still have a link or some search pointers to the article about SBC please? Would love to read it
• rkangel 9mo ago
  It might be a little worse in China, but you get a lot of the same behaviour from contract manufacturers everywhere else. I've been working on a high volume consumer product (you've almost certainly heard of it) and the manufacturer has used any slight delay by any other party to shift the schedule back by weeks or months. Late in the process we realised that they'd switched a capacitor for a lower cost one - same capacitance but lacking in some other spec points that were important. There isn't a lot of room for them to build things to a lower spec because the specs are pretty thorough and nailed down, but anywhere there is room they have gone lower cost.