By now most of the manufacturing advantage is expertise and network effect. If you're in China you can get specialized parts in under a day by literally showing up to the factory and asking for a one off, which saves a lot of money, and you save on shipping and can iterate faster, and you can find skilled workers for literally anything in a week or two. So even if you're paying 2x as much for labour you still end up saving massive amounts of money.
Oh wow that's interesting. I kind of figured at this point something like that was going on. How'd you learn this stuff? Any good articles or books to read?
By now most of the manufacturing advantage is expertise and network effect. If you're in China you can get specialized parts in under a day by literally showing up to the factory and asking for a one off, which saves a lot of money, and you save on shipping and can iterate faster, and you can find skilled workers for literally anything in a week or two. So even if you're paying 2x as much for labour you still end up saving massive amounts of money.
Oh wow that's interesting. I kind of figured at this point something like that was going on. How'd you learn this stuff? Any good articles or books to read?
If you can stomach listening to Tim Cook, he talks about that quite a bit in this interview. About 9 minutes in is the most relevant portion.