Redbeard
Official Corsair Rep.
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2005
- Messages
- 1,859
The mac cases probably made in China/Taiwan anways... just like the Lian Li. We all know that the iphones are made in China With deductive reasoning they should have similar built quality
Fiat is made in Italy, and so is Ferrari and Lambourghini.
China and Taiwan have made their names as manufacturers based almost entirely on cost. Building and manufacturing there costs a fraction of what it costs here due to the cost of labor differences. Because of that, the nature of most manufacturing in the region is "let's get the costs down any way we can" and they don't usually focus on the same nitpicky quality things.
A great example is the HX series PSUs we launched in 2006, the HX520 and HX620. We went to Seasonic to get them built and we specified stuff like 105C Japanese capacitors. They looked at us like we were nuts. "It's going to cost more" was what we kept hearing. They weren't really fond of the idea. There are tons of good Chinese/Taiwanese caps, they claimed. And to some degree, they were right. But we made the decision for a specific reason, and at the end of the day it didn't cost THAT much more to do it. I think it was less than $1 per unit to upgrade all the caps to 105C Japanese caps. With HX1000, we did it again with the solid-state caps we requested. Did it make a significant difference to the end-user? Probably not. But CWT was again dumbfounded at the request due to the fact that it would add costs.
Apple may have manufacturing in China but that doesn't explain the quality of their parts. Your hardware is only as good as your Quality Control engineering team is. Apple's fairly infamous for being super controlling on their contract manufacturers from a leaks standpoint to a quality standpoint. I heard a rumor that when they introduced the new unibody Macbook Pro, they basically had machines designed from the ground up to build the chassis, and they bought something like 50 or 100 of these machines, which must have cost in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars each.
But then again, even though Apple is only, what, 10% of the computer market, they're still WAY larger than the DIY builder market, which is like 3% of all computer users at the highest estimates I've heard.
Which means that even the best selling computer case at Newegg (if you go by reviews it might be something like the Antec 900) probably doesn't sell anywhere near the quantity of the worst-selling Apple product (due to its price, likely the Mac Pro).
So it'd be a lot easier for Apple to go to Foxconn or whoever and say "We want you to build this chassis to this spec using these machines and we're only going to sell 20,000 a month" as opposed to, say, Corsair going to Foxconn and asking them to build the exact same thing and promising them 10% of those sales, at best. Apple might pay $250 for each chassis, while we'd have to pay probably twice that just to buy it. Add on margins for Corsair and then again for the retailer, you're looking at a $1000 computer case, at best.
Anyway, it's a combination of economics of scale and the leverage of large, multi-billion dollar companies compared to companies a fraction of that size. Apple can make or break the year for Foxconn with manufacturing. Corsair, even though we're one of the biggest players in the PC DIY market, couldn't. So why would a manufacturer of cases bend over backwards to build something so complex and difficult when the volume isn't there? It's much easier for them to just use their existing machines, processes, and people to make something in the same way they're used to making it.
That being said, if a Mac Pro chassis is a 10 for build quality, there are a few of us in the 9 range. Which costs a fraction of building a 10.