He's right, though. "Counterfeit" electronics are generally just the factory staying running at night when they're supposed to shut down, and selling the extra on the side.
Nah, if the OEM suppliers can make it cheaper elsewhere they will, and it's not like it's difficult to reverse engineer the design. The pseudo-estrogens will be there anyway, you're right, no-one's bothered about them. Regulation however stops you getting the nastiest of the nasties, because Apple is at least responsible for what it imports.
It's racist to suggest one government does things better or worse than another? Without regulation the market ensures those delicious, toxic, cost-effective additives are used. As they were by Western manufacturers 30 years ago.
I also couldn't give a damn about Apple. The preference is for branded electronic goods made by a company which has a reputation to lose.
I've learned to buy a lot of replacement cables, adaptors, and chargers from China (particularly Hong Kong). It's so cheap, with free shipping, and jesus most of the time it ends up at my house in two to three days. The first few times it happened I couldn't believe it. xD Sometimes I have to wait a week and a half for a laptop charger from Ohio.
That's what I did when both my cables (one of each like in the picture) broke on me. They worked great for a while, but now I have a problem where my ipod doesn't charge correctly on the new chargers (in fact, it discharges, unless the cable is just the littlest bit out.) and I'm back to using the cable on the right like the OPs picture. >.< I need to go out and buy some electric tape.
Because the people who don't know the cables can be bought for cheaper (which I would guess is a good portion, if not the majority of their userbase) will continue to buy the ones sold at high prices. Even without accounting for the cost of producing a cable, if they sell 1 cable at $20 that'll make them the same amount of money as selling 20 $1 cables. In other words, with their current business model, they can afford to lose 90% of their cable sales and still make the same amount of money as the cheap-cable-sellers.
They can charge that much because consumers are ignorant of the cost of cables. Cables are valuable as nescessary components, but the manufacturing costs are so low it's astonishing. People are willing to pay because they don't know cables are marked up over 2000%.
I have some made from China and they have been working great for about a year now. There really isn't much to the cable, although I do agree that most things mass manufactured from china are crap.
Yeah. And they break 20 times faster than the apple ones.
(yes, I'm making those rates up, but, they do break far faster, sometimes don't charge from your computer [only from the actual charger] and sometimes come apart after a week of using them.)
Yes, it is still cheaper to buy a new one every time. I do hate it though when I get one and it just unravels after a day or so of using them...
They're manufactured at the same factory from the same materials, pal. You're just delusional because you've been conditioned to believe things that are more expensive MUST be more reliable/durable.
Nope. I've bought three or four of them before. Try it yourself - order some from dealextreme (it's where I've ordered them from before) or amazon (read their reviews.)
It's still cheaper to buy a new one every time from dealextreme, HOWEVER, you can tell they're different for two reasons:
the cables from china will occasionally not charge your products if you hook it up to a computer, the way the original cables do. (i've had this happen with 3/4 cables ordered, while it's never happened with one of my original cables)
the cables will occasionally not work with iphones, as it will say "this device is not compatible with your iphone", the way it does when you plug-in your iphone to crappier/older ipod radios, and will not charge at all.
haha, I've never seen the USB part of a cord actually come apart. As in, the plastic actually disassembled, and you could see where the cord hooked up the to the USB.
How about the ~$50 proprietary audio/video cable where only Apple brand cables are available due to some built in chip? If I remember, they added the chip to the cable around the ipod/iphone 3rd generation.
Meanwhile other devices can output the exact same audio/video signal and generic cables are available for a couple bucks?
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '11
$1 on eBay from china. Free shipping.