Quality Cannot Compensate for Stupidity

You can't make everything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious!

Just think of what a utopia the world would be if only the UN were in charge.

Of everything.

Thats cheap Chinese batteries for you......

The idea is very good, but the costs involved would be passed onto the consumer.....

I have a couple of good suppliers that I use in the Far East, I have tested the products and found them good for the price. "Eachbuyer" being a good example. Only some of their complete LED light fittings are a bit TOO cheap. A friend bought some, each was damaged in transport and I took them apart and re-soldered them. They now work great.

All the LED bulbs (to describe them only - actually dozens of tiny LEDs) are truly really good value for money. None have failed in the last year.....they are a tiny percentage of what they cost here and probably come from the same factory!!

I bought a great LIPO charger for 100 -250VAC, but overlooked the fact that it had a USA plug!! An adapter fixed that!!

A friend bought Halogen replacement LEDs and overlooked that they were not for AC!! 12VDC only - they blew!!!

Be careful, he is no dummy and he ordered wrongly......so be careful.... for example if you want warm white LED bulbs, check, check, check!

But the stuff is great!!

Dude, you need your own planet. Where everything works the way you want it to work?

Putting it all into the hands of the UN is Stupidity Incarnate. Given your previous (numerous, and rather tiresome) rants, I would think that you, of all people, would know that intimately.

Personally, I inspect everything I buy to be sure it is not "Made in Shri Lanka"

What are you talking about? they can't even enforce the resolutions they set forth now.

Nowadays with most equipment, manufacturers will tell you to always replace batteries or any other components with genuine parts.........one can be selective in to how far this is taken with the knowledge one has of the particular device to know what you can get away with and what you cannot.

You also need to know the quality of the the spare part that you are replacing with the non-genuine part and batteries can be very dicey.........as I said I think that product knowledge is the basis of selection of spares.

Idiot proofing=better idiots

"It's a Sony!™ Again and again!"

And if thinning the herd is not an option, no worries:

Can quality take care of stupidity? Sure, if you want to pay a little more.

Years ago when I was working in the semiconductor industry, a field rep for a photolithography stepper was servicing one of our steppers and noticed we had the incoming power fed thru a line conditioner. He asked why we did that since his steppers had conditioning built into their power supplies. We had done that because it improved the operation of a different brand of stepper, so the "improvement" was fanned out to all steppers, all sites. All this to say, you can have your quality on-board or as an add on. (In this case, a superfluous both.)

Cell phones, if I understand correctly, save some space and cost by putting battery regulation inside the battery. The battery is expected to take care of itself and even reports its charge level to the phone, the phone doesn't read and caclulate that. The phone maker doesn't control the 3rd party battery makers, so they don't control all of the possible battery possibilities except by telling the user which batteries to use. The phone maker could design its phones to take over all of the power and charging tasks with a more robust design which would accept all possible batteries, but this would drive up its costs. Would customers pay for that?

I imagine that is why you can't change an iPhone battery. Apple designs systems and this is how they control the battery used in the sysytem.

Like the iPhone, HTC ONE handsets are also sealed units. I've never been quite sure what the rationale is for sealing-in the battery, as sometimes the software locks-up the phone and the only way to reset it is by removing the battery.

The other thing I don't like about sealed-in batteries is that I don't know when or even if the phone is truly turned-off when I want it to be. And given recent revelations about this country's government's considerable and demonstrated respect for its own Bill of Rights, I'd rather know for a fact that some agency hasn't switched-on the phone's mic and cameras (it has two) without my knowledge and permission (both sidestepped for my own protection of course). I doubt if they have, but then we also have the problem of hackers, school administration officials, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum, doing the same thing. If I want the phone truly turned off, I want to know that it is and that it's not just 'playing possum.'

It's not the stupid fools I'm concerned about so much as it is the other fools which are just foolish enough to cause great harm, on purpose.

Putting that tiny little regulator in the phone makes sense as a fool-proofing aid, but it doesn't make sense financially for the handset manufacturer's bottom line. Same with Quality Control: if your customers will buy your sh!t anyway (witness any number of products people will buy regardless), why spend money on a quality control department when quality doesn't matter to the consumer? Let them 'test' it. If it fails and you have to replace it, it's still cheaper than making a higher-quality product from superior materials together with the expense of verifying that it is so.

We'll get better products once we stop settling for crap.

I also prefer to be able to pull the battery completely out of the unit. I mention Apple because they control their systems very tightly, which is part of how they control their quality. They do not allow apps into their store until Apple is satisfied the app will play nicely with their OS. They do not let you touch the battery.

One of the big ways electronics industry has lowered its costs is to "offshore" its costs of poor quality. Eg, short to no warranty so customer has to pay for extended warranty; design and market for short product life so customer pays to replace every year or two.

Funny how Samsung can make the same product as Apple but sell it at 1/3 the price. That was the Big Unintended Message of Apple's legal actions against Samsung: "Not only can you make what we're making (Apple's in China) but now you're exposing our huge profit margins by charging considerably less for your versions whilst still making a tidy profit yourselves! Shame on you for exposing our unmitigated greed!"

A lot of consumer products are made by robots. Once the design and production processes are refined, you have to 'build-in' lower quality usually, I suspect, by using cheaper materials. But if a robot can automatically machine a part to, say, a 0.0005" tolerance, then it doesn't cost any less to machine it to any lower tolerance: it still takes the same time and tooling, so what's up with lower quality in such situations?

I have owned two GM cars, a Chevy and a Cadillac. Similar years. The heater fan in the Chevy was noisy whilst the fan in the Caddy was quiet. Both fan blades are made from plastic, presumably the same kind of plastic, and so it's not an issue with the materials used, but with the design. But once the thing is designed, you don't keep designing it. In the case of fan blades, both had to be designed at some point. The noisy one and the quiet one. Why then are they still using noisy ones?

The fan blades in the Caddy have that 'swept-back' appearance of blades designed with efficiency and low-noise in mind. This same blade could be used in the Chevy, but it is not. The tooling for both kinds exist, the process exists, all the R&D is done, the fans are similar in size and use a similar (or the same) plastic in their construction, and so what's the problem? Why must the Chevy use a crappy, noisy fan blade, when a quiet one is available that would do just as well? I don't get it.

This is an example of where higher quality costs no more or the same as lower quality, and would even save the company money in that only one type of blade need be stocked for both models, so why aren't they doing it? Intentionally-lower quality design in the Chevy to widen the apparent contrast in quality between the two models in order to justify a higher sales price? Hell, I don't know.

They probably just do it because they can!!!!

or

just to be a right pain in the backside!!!!