4 ms·

>I’d love to learn more about these secretive industries and the engineers who work in them. Isn't it pretty well known that 1) they aren't secretive and 2) th

by aroch 13y ago

>I’d love to learn more about these secretive industries and the engineers who work in them. Isn't it pretty well known that 1) they aren't secretive and 2) they don't actually design their own hardware. They start off by producing the legitimate item, in the factory that's contracted by the company who designed the product. If the product is successful or easily fits in their existing knockoff fabs, they plans are basically copied over

wtallis 13y ago
While that does happen, not all knockoffs are just counterfeits made to the approximate specs of the original. There are a ton of knockoffs that have radically different internals that required significant engineering effort to design.
chockablock 13y ago
The example in the article is of a functional cloned part that has half as many pins, and needs only 1 external oscillator instead of 2. Author does not decap the chip, but the implication is that there was indeed some real engineering that went into the design of the clone.
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  Well, maybe. The original has 47 power pins, more than the counterfeit has any pins. It's likely that the original designers included these to improve noise margins in various parts of the chip. It's also likely that the 32-pin version has rather worse problems with power and ground noise. It _is_ possible, of course, that the original has excessive margins and the counterfeit one is a tighter design. We'd have to see the eye diagrams on both sides to be sure.
  - userbinator 13y ago
    But all of that speculation is not comparable to actually seeing the clone work in real-world situations. I would've liked to see the OP do a benchmark on transfer rates between the original and the clone. (Unless he aleady did one and didn't find any difference.)
    - rsynnott 13y ago
      From the post: "When I ran a TCP throughput test with iperf, they both performed well. The Apple adapter measured throughput of 94.3Mbps. The cheap adapter measured 87.4Mbps. By comparison, the builtin ethernet on my laptop measured 94.8Mbps (after being set from gigabit to 100Mbps.)" So, there is a difference, but it's relatively small (and possibly acceptable for the things people use ultra-cheap ethernet adaptors for).
      - userbinator 13y ago
        Sorry, didn't see that (just dived right into the teardown. :) So it's a ~7% difference, indicating that it's not a straight clone but different silicon with a compatible interface.
      - thrownaway2424 13y ago
        It might work well when attached to another device with high (i.e. industry-normal) noise margins. I'd be quite interested to see the performance of two adapters connected together, or connected with a cable wrapped 10 times around a pencil.
      - foobarian 13y ago
        I would've liked to see a UDP based packet loss report, and also at a couple of different packet sizes. The throughput drop could be due to packet loss, maybe from more noisy circuitry, or it could be due to a bottleneck on the USB side of things. Smaller packets are good at finding those because they generate more events per unit time. I saw this with a bunch of crappy WiFi dongles. The radio can run at the 54Mbps or whatever but the USB interface tops out at 20.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
rsynnott 13y ago
This part pretty clearly isn't a knockoff, though; it's a version made cheap almost to the limits of practicality (or maybe beyond, if you care about producing radio interference) through design changes.
gbog 13y ago
They aren't secretive, but they are hungry, and they are foolish. I'd venture the shanzhai chinese geeks fiddling relentlessly with hardware in Guangzhou are much closer to Steve Jobs' ideal than the average Apple Store clients. On one side you have rich kids who can afford a $30 dongle, knowing perfectly (after reading this article) that they are giving away $25 to a marketing department and that they are bowing to their own voodooish cargo cult. These guys are simply afraid of the remote possibility of having to spend 5 mn of their precious time checking a connection, and maybe too, something really catastrophic! lose ONE of their 10.000 instagram pizza photos because of a subpar component in their setup. On the other side you have these ugly hackers who are photocopying hardware components for 1 year old companies named Yunxingdianziguangzhoujituanyouxiangongsi, and their logo is ugly, and these guys are Chinese! I know them: they are hungry, not only hungry for money, but also hungry for knowledge, recognition, they are curious about the world, about the future, and they have no fear for bad taste: a pink iPhone clone with teddy bear shape? check!
- WoodenChair 13y ago
  It's a poor analogy for many reasons, not the least of which is to SJ: - Taste mattered a great deal - he definitely did have a "fear for bad taste" - Things being perfect and working perfectly out of the box without "5 mn of their precious time checking a connection" mattered a great deal - User experience mattered more than price - SJ wasn't interested in commodities Also I don't know why you would refer to the guys as "ugly" and why you exclaim that "and these guys are Chinese!" There's something subtly racial about your view in the whole post. Would it be any less of an exclamation if they were Peruvian?
  - gbog 13y ago
    Wow, you got it wrong: it must be my mistake, I was a bit too assuming on the context. - For me being "foolish", in the mouth of Steve Jobs, means not caring at all about what other people will say or think. I see a link with the peculiar "bad taste" of shanzhai: they do not care what "good taste" people think of pink Teddy bear shaped phones. - I am living in China since 10 years, my wife is Chinese, my kids are half-Chinese, all my colleagues and many of my friends are Chinese. My comment was not "subtly racial", it was (trying to be) ironically emphasising the fact that in some people's disdain of shanzhai cheap gadgets, there is also the fact that those who build them are Chinese. Just like 30 years ago saying a car was Japanese meant something cheap, copied, second-grade, right now the same applies to Chinese manufacturing. And, in fact, often justifiably so! There are three kind of products quality made in China: 1) The very cheap that is sold in developping countries (have you ever seen those electric plugs with a single hair of copper inside for conductivity? cost nothing, burns after 10mn use). 2) The high quality sold to developed countries with Western brands. E.g. the Apple usb dongle in question here. 3) The medium quality sold internally and in developed countries as cheap alternatives to 2) above. By the way, this 3) class is the most interesting because as the Chinese middle class raise its income level, it will have to become better and better, until a Chinese brand will do better than what is imitated currently (just as Japan did with cars, hifi, etc.). I hear often that Chinese people cannot produce quality because of some of their "cultural atavism", and I think this is very wrong. In the past, they were manufacturing the best of breed in many domains, and in all their region of influence having "北京" (Beijing) stamped on goods was enough to triple its price.

by aroch 13y ago

wtallis 13y ago

While that does happen, not all knockoffs are just counterfeits made to the approximate specs of the original. There are a ton of knockoffs that have radically different internals that required significant engineering effort to design.

chockablock 13y ago

The example in the article is of a functional cloned part that has half as many pins, and needs only 1 external oscillator instead of 2. Author does not decap the chip, but the implication is that there was indeed some real engineering that went into the design of the clone.

thrownaway2424 13y ago
Well, maybe. The original has 47 power pins, more than the counterfeit has any pins. It's likely that the original designers included these to improve noise margins in various parts of the chip. It's also likely that the 32-pin version has rather worse problems with power and ground noise. It _is_ possible, of course, that the original has excessive margins and the counterfeit one is a tighter design. We'd have to see the eye diagrams on both sides to be sure.
- userbinator 13y ago
  But all of that speculation is not comparable to actually seeing the clone work in real-world situations. I would've liked to see the OP do a benchmark on transfer rates between the original and the clone. (Unless he aleady did one and didn't find any difference.)
  - rsynnott 13y ago
    From the post: "When I ran a TCP throughput test with iperf, they both performed well. The Apple adapter measured throughput of 94.3Mbps. The cheap adapter measured 87.4Mbps. By comparison, the builtin ethernet on my laptop measured 94.8Mbps (after being set from gigabit to 100Mbps.)" So, there is a difference, but it's relatively small (and possibly acceptable for the things people use ultra-cheap ethernet adaptors for).
    - userbinator 13y ago
      Sorry, didn't see that (just dived right into the teardown. :) So it's a ~7% difference, indicating that it's not a straight clone but different silicon with a compatible interface.
    - thrownaway2424 13y ago
      It might work well when attached to another device with high (i.e. industry-normal) noise margins. I'd be quite interested to see the performance of two adapters connected together, or connected with a cable wrapped 10 times around a pencil.
    - foobarian 13y ago
      I would've liked to see a UDP based packet loss report, and also at a couple of different packet sizes. The throughput drop could be due to packet loss, maybe from more noisy circuitry, or it could be due to a bottleneck on the USB side of things. Smaller packets are good at finding those because they generate more events per unit time. I saw this with a bunch of crappy WiFi dongles. The radio can run at the 54Mbps or whatever but the USB interface tops out at 20.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]

rsynnott 13y ago

This part pretty clearly isn't a knockoff, though; it's a version made cheap almost to the limits of practicality (or maybe beyond, if you care about producing radio interference) through design changes.

gbog 13y ago

They aren't secretive, but they are hungry, and they are foolish. I'd venture the shanzhai chinese geeks fiddling relentlessly with hardware in Guangzhou are much closer to Steve Jobs' ideal than the average Apple Store clients. On one side you have rich kids who can afford a $30 dongle, knowing perfectly (after reading this article) that they are giving away $25 to a marketing department and that they are bowing to their own voodooish cargo cult. These guys are simply afraid of the remote possibility of having to spend 5 mn of their precious time checking a connection, and maybe too, something really catastrophic! lose ONE of their 10.000 instagram pizza photos because of a subpar component in their setup. On the other side you have these ugly hackers who are photocopying hardware components for 1 year old companies named Yunxingdianziguangzhoujituanyouxiangongsi, and their logo is ugly, and these guys are Chinese! I know them: they are hungry, not only hungry for money, but also hungry for knowledge, recognition, they are curious about the world, about the future, and they have no fear for bad taste: a pink iPhone clone with teddy bear shape? check!

WoodenChair 13y ago
It's a poor analogy for many reasons, not the least of which is to SJ: - Taste mattered a great deal - he definitely did have a "fear for bad taste" - Things being perfect and working perfectly out of the box without "5 mn of their precious time checking a connection" mattered a great deal - User experience mattered more than price - SJ wasn't interested in commodities Also I don't know why you would refer to the guys as "ugly" and why you exclaim that "and these guys are Chinese!" There's something subtly racial about your view in the whole post. Would it be any less of an exclamation if they were Peruvian?
- gbog 13y ago
  Wow, you got it wrong: it must be my mistake, I was a bit too assuming on the context. - For me being "foolish", in the mouth of Steve Jobs, means not caring at all about what other people will say or think. I see a link with the peculiar "bad taste" of shanzhai: they do not care what "good taste" people think of pink Teddy bear shaped phones. - I am living in China since 10 years, my wife is Chinese, my kids are half-Chinese, all my colleagues and many of my friends are Chinese. My comment was not "subtly racial", it was (trying to be) ironically emphasising the fact that in some people's disdain of shanzhai cheap gadgets, there is also the fact that those who build them are Chinese. Just like 30 years ago saying a car was Japanese meant something cheap, copied, second-grade, right now the same applies to Chinese manufacturing. And, in fact, often justifiably so! There are three kind of products quality made in China: 1) The very cheap that is sold in developping countries (have you ever seen those electric plugs with a single hair of copper inside for conductivity? cost nothing, burns after 10mn use). 2) The high quality sold to developed countries with Western brands. E.g. the Apple usb dongle in question here. 3) The medium quality sold internally and in developed countries as cheap alternatives to 2) above. By the way, this 3) class is the most interesting because as the Chinese middle class raise its income level, it will have to become better and better, until a Chinese brand will do better than what is imitated currently (just as Japan did with cars, hifi, etc.). I hear often that Chinese people cannot produce quality because of some of their "cultural atavism", and I think this is very wrong. In the past, they were manufacturing the best of breed in many domains, and in all their region of influence having "北京" (Beijing) stamped on goods was enough to triple its price.