Depressing.

Who do you blame? The company for doing what they are supposed to do, which is to maximize value for the shareholders? The U.S. gov't for not doing a better job of promoting and subsidizing manufacturing here? The customer, who in general, just wants their products cheap and doesn't care where they are made?

Depressing.

I dunno if it is depressing so much as just "the way things currently are".

It is not just that American consumers want "inexpensive goods", they also want weekends off to watch their kids play soccer and they don't want to have factories anywhere in breathing distance that belch out noxious fumes.


Maybe in a decade or so Chinese consumers and workers will want these things and manufacturing will shift to Africa or some other even more lawless place...

Sounds like you would prefer going back to the pre-1863 set of labor laws that this country used to have. You might also prefer living in a third world country.

The problem is that the supply chain for the parts no longer is based in the US. In order to compete, companies build factories where they don't incur a lot of shipping costs. We are no longer the major consumer market that we once were and our regulations are way beyond any other manufacturing country. I read the article and was very impressed that a shift foreman could mobilize his workers (8000 of em) to start work and get the job at least working in the middle of the night. That kind of response is probably not available to a small company like Outlaw, the way it is to Apple, but it speaks volumes about the work ethic of both countries. It is unfortunate that getting an engineering degree in this country no longer guarantees you won't be flippin burgers to pay off the school loans. The asian markets also employ a lot of quasi engineers with the right skillset but not the diploma that has all the extraneous junk courses required in american colleges.

Neither. I think that the specializations that suit countries where low skill labor is the predominate form of industrialization are no longer suited to the US. The consequences of fewer people being involved in such employment in this country ought to be that more folks take on the greater value-add functions. To some extent this is true -- firms like Outlaw require people saavy in audio design, consumer marketing / communication (maybe they need to beef up that function),technical support and other areas that do not lend themselves to "line workers".

Yes, I am well aquainted with the arguement "every country needs some garbage collectors" but I simply reject extending that to say "every country ought to have a functioning high-value consumer electronics assembly business". For a whole multitude of reasons that seems unrealistic.

I might conceded that low volume /high cost audio firms have employees with skills similar enough to those working for proto-type shops / defense contractors, and in some stretched sense are conceivably part of the broad "strategic work force", though I have not really found that arguement to be convincng from the whole "I don't want my stuff made in some country trying to bury us" set.

Perhaps if the economics pressures that have presented themselves to the global economy result in more US workers being prepared to accept the conditions that exist in overseas factories the ability for high value firms to find a US workforce to fufill the "Made In Amercia" pleas of some will materialize.


I suppose the continued growth of wealthier workers in far away lands may also dampen their competitive edge.

From a global competitive standard point I suspect that the elite in China are probably already importing McIntosh electronics to show off their wealth. I wonder how that will work out...

Two things:

a) Just how many Outlaw 978's do you think will be sold in China?



*Something* has to be shipped *somewhere*. Whether it's the parts necessary to build a 978, or the final product. So that argument doesn't work for me. Whether you ship the final unit from China to the US, or the parts necessary to build one from there to here, there are still shipping costs.

b) Mobilizing a workforce to work at midnight. Work ethic? How about that that is really just a form of corporate slavery in China?

I hate to say it, but a lot of these seem to me to be "excuses" and not "reasons" why something can't be manufactured here.

There *are* products manufactured here, and those companies can compete just fine with the differences between here and there.

The point I was making was that as long as the rest of the world didn't buy so many products and the US consumer did, it made sense to have factories here. Now the rest of the world buys more stuff than we do and it costs much less to ship from over there than it does here. How many 978s do you think will be sold? If the 10000 threshhold gets crossed I think Outlaw will be able to break about even. Now think of how many much larger competitors will sell their equipment in orders of magnitude more. Like I said before, a small company like Outlaw has to be nimble and not invest in a lot of infrastructure in order to survive.

There are quality electronics built in the USA but they are way out of my league and I make quite a bit of $$$. I want bang for the buck and if it means China builds it, so be it.

10,000 978's? Really? I would be surprised if Outlaw sold a total of 10,000 990's and 1050's combined over their product lives. Consequently, I was expecting that the 978 would might sell 3,000 to 5,000 units over the product's life depending upon the length of the product cycle and whether the 998 cannibalizes sales after it is introduced.

You're expecting the 998 to be introduced? Really?

I asked a while back how many 990s were sold. Does anyone have a older version of the 990 so we can compare serial numbers? Might get us an educated guess. Remember too that the 978 has to cover the 997 R&D to to break even.