🐈

u know how ping pong balls come in 1 star, 2 star, and 3 star varieties? They’re all part of the same process, it’s the QA that filters out the good from the bad.

just like all the other Stuff in the world it’s prolly all made in like one single factory in China.

the highest quality stuff comes out of China and so does the lowest quality stuff. it’s just the QA and branding that filters out the stuff that explodes from the stuff sold at 10x markup.

(Apple btw is a bad example b/c they control so much end to end. It’s the commoditized stuff where there’s high variance in quality like ping pong balls that this is about)

the point is that there’s no one intentionally making poor quality stuff and good quality stuff. Production lines have variance at every step and the more complex the end product the more chances for a combination of bad quality to mess it up

E.g. 99% accuracy for say 100 different parts means that a perfect end product chance is 0.99 ^ 100 = 36%.

b/c china is mostly poor, tossing out 64% is unacceptable. the lower quality product is just sold in the domestic market for 10x cheaper even though the same factory makes them.

so when someone doesn’t want to pay 10x markup b/c “it’s all branding and marketing” misses the point that the 10x markup is the “it just works” price of going through reliable QA