Thinkpads Forum

it seems that there is something shady with the labor practice of this subcontractors. i saw in a new york times report that there are many tragedies going on for the workers over there....

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/techn ... f=business

do they also take contracts from lenovo for thinkpads. i do not want my laptop to be blood-stained...

Yes they do.

And I'd still buy a Thinkpad, at least when prototype information is leaked, there are no Foxconn workers jumping off buildings.

There is only one company that is capable of making people die just by their prototype leaks, and I'll be nice enough to not mention their name.

we all know the name of that company.

While any suicide is tragic, the special attention levied on Foxconn appears to be a red herring. China is average, worldwide, in terms of suicide rates, with a rate of 13.9 per 100,000 per year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... icide_rate

Foxconn employs 800,000 people overall, 300,000 of which are located in one factory in Shenzhen. To meet China's average there would have to be 41 suicides in that factory per year. If anything this tells us that (a) the place is gigantic, much bigger than what any of us would conceive a factory to be, and (b) the suicide rate appears to be below the national average.

My attention was drawn to this by some other posts on the Internet, a small minority of posts to be sure, but the numbers do stack up. Someone else also pointed out that working conditions on the land are even harder and Foxconn has about 10 times more applicants than they can hire.

This is not to say working conditions are good. It's not to say they don't merit investigation. It's not to say that being a factory worker at Foxconn is a good career move or that you could stand it for more than a few years. It's only to say that these emotionally charged headlines we are seeing are, in fact, very misleading.

Are you willing to give up most of your consumer electronics in your home and probably your clothing?

Actually Foxconn is not the assembling plant for Thinkpad. Lenovo has its own production plants. And u know what, the biggest contract of Foxcoon comes from Apple. And rumor has it that Apple's harsh and critical requirement of production,say the usage of very poisonous chemicals, makes a lot of workers stressful!! The first suicide of Foxconn happened because that person lost one of Apple's prototype iPhone 3gs and feared to face harsh punishment from Apple.

The only reason the suicides are in the news is because there is also controversy over the working conditions at their facilities.

And if you are thinking of trying to avoid Foxconn -- you can't. It is extremely difficult because they just make SO MUCH stuff.

http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/8835/dsc2176.jpg (RJ-11 w/ RS-232 beware.)

Lenovo does have their own plants they inherited from the IBM PC division, however they are not vertically intergrated.

Besides, Lenovo doesn't do what the fruit company does to their subcontractor's employees (Read: Drive them to suicide)

Navck wrote:Besides, Lenovo doesn't do what the fruit company does to their employees (Read: Drive them to suicide)

The suicides you're referring to were committed by Foxconn (not Apple) employees.

A couple of interesting articles on Foxconn:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/new ... ce-foxconn

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/new ... ddy-kruger

Perhaps the reason Apple, HP et al are distancing themselves from Foxconn is that the latter may well become a direct competitor, rather than any real concern over working conditions.

Apple does their own inhouse design. Not that its anything resembling good but it is still their own inhouse design.
Lenovo does their own inhouse design for Thinkpads, I can't say that all the Ideapads are inhouse.

Sony technically dumps a ton of money out occasionally to get something done fir their VAIOs, not necessarily efficient but technically "original" enough.
HP technically tried to do their own inhouse solutions (Long, convoluted story of trying to outsource to Asia and doing it the wrong way), but they failed miserably there so they...
Dell, HP mostly, etc do not do their own inhouse design and contract out in a rare blue moon for something, otherwise they just rebadge Quantas/Compals (Or the guts of one and fit em in a new chassis "sometimes.")

However, don't quote me on the latter half of that, most of that comes from older information which may or may not be correct anymore.

Interesting. So, am I to take it that ThinkPads are among a select few notebooks that aren't rebadged, facelifted 'dime a dozen' models?

Yup. Well if you ignore the whole Acer made iSeries back in the IBM days.
Just like Apple's (Horribly anti-engineered but highly successful market) of Macbooks are also "unique."
You might occasionally see a few one off laptops from other companies that aren't rebadged ODM machines.

What happens is they basically design a baseline system, the planar, possible mounting positions, maybe the inner shell, the LCD and all. Then a company like Dell might get them to do a little redesign to that, or actually do their own redesign before having that reproduced as "their" Inspiron (Number here) system. They can do all sorts of things to throw you off by changing a few design elements (Different hinges, heck you could probably convert some designs to an Ultraportable with a few changes in this case) so they're "unique" machines. They're not, they're just modified off one design that one of the ODMs made.

However, if you want to see one of these original designs in their purest form, check Sager's offerings out. They basically what the others (Dell, HP, etc) use for their baseline design in terms of "guts" (Planar layout, heatsink placement, etc).

Navck wrote: Dell, HP mostly, etc do not do their own inhouse design and contract out in a rare blue moon for something, otherwise they just rebadge Quantas/Compals (Or the guts of one and fit em in a new chassis "sometimes."

Dell have outsourced their European manufacturing facility at Lodz in Poland to Foxconn:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/new ... ns-foxconn

Similarly, both Acer and Intel are courting Foxconn, with the latter allegedly subbing out R&D to them as well:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/new ... r-contract

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/opi ... ipple-asus

(One of my reasons for liking ThinkPads is that they aren't just rebadged OEM products, but properly thought out and designed with fairly meticulous attention to detail, right down to the HMM.)

Yeah, one of the silly things people were complaining about when Lenovo was buying the IBM PC Div was that "the design staff would be replaced by rebadged designs."

If anything, even the Edges are well designed machines at this point, the design team is an investment they kept. This is why I bought my T410 after five years with the T43.

I applaud the principle of not buying Foxconn products. The reality, though, is that virtually every electronics company in China is as guilty as Foxconn is of rights violations (by Western standards). It's just that these companies aren't big enough players to get enough press.

If one wanted to be consistent with clear-conscience buying of laptops, I think that the choice would boil to owning a laptop vs not owning a laptop. I don't know of any laptops that are wholly made in the USA or under non sweat-shop conditions.

Well, you always can get an American product built with Cheetos coated, unloving fingers that receive a paycheck in minimum wage. All in the name of attempting to look busy, passing bare minimum on spotty QC checks due to a highly unmotivated union of workers who do not love their job or product while pushing for higher wages, made in the United States.

Or you can, on rare occasion, find a product built with love, skill and pride made in the United States. But last time I checked those tend to be pretty expensive, high end products that most people cannot appreciate and call overpriced. Of course they're all fine with the former product, no matter how terrible it is.

<Insert crude, vile and most likely mean spirited joke about American Automove Industry here>

Navck wrote:Well, you always can get an American product built with Cheetos coated, unloving fingers that receive a paycheck in minimum wage. All in the name of attempting to look busy, passing bare minimum on spotty QC checks due to a highly unmotivated union of workers who do not love their job or product while pushing for higher wages, made in the United States.

Or you can, on rare occasion, find a product built with love, skill and pride made in the United States. But last time I checked those tend to be pretty expensive, high end products that most people cannot appreciate and call overpriced. Of course they're all fine with the former product, no matter how terrible it is.

<Insert crude, vile and most likely mean spirited joke about American Automove Industry here>

Boeing, Northrup, Lockheed-Martin, Microsoft, Adobe, are world leaders in what they do and for the most part wholly made in the USA and proud. Are you American or not? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m33X6FsV4sQ&feature=fvsr We are ready for N. Korea. Anytime. Still have the technology lead Braddah. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19XXTArAGaM

The aerospace industry would most likely want you to know (You know, Pratt and Witney from UTC, GE) that they're not "only" American.
http://www.pwc.ca/

Also they would like you to know that they want the concept of "American Automotive and (Low end) Manufacturing Industry" should be completely disassociated from them, especially when the turbine fan blades cost between 50-100k a pop.

Oh wait, they're that rare occasion next to very expensive (Or what people call "overpriced, frivolous and stupid" items "bought by Wallstreet scam artists who steal from the glorious people.") market of high performance flashlights, competition 1911 pattern handguns and custom tools like prybars.
Strangely, the last time I checked, that latter markets and the aerospace industry do not work the way the laptop industry works.

By the way, North Korea? Thats kind of like stealing candy from a child, then grabbing their head and slamming it into the curb. (Really, come on, even (Insert random European country, ANY of them including Eastern Europe and Ex-Soviet) could pound North Korea into a pulp.)

Dear Moderators: I am not trolling, I'm just being outrageously sarcastic to illustrate a point that most people get uptight over. Hopefully the humor with soothe the audacity of the situation of how America has a wide dynamic range in terms of market quality.

Seems like a serious case of OD on Michael Moore films and er excuse me extreme liberal. Who do you think fought for your freedom to post online here to take an alternative view? A least be more respectful on Memorial Day weekend? Thank You.

.... Oohhh, I am a liberal now, yes?
I guess the concept of globalization is considered economically liberal.
Just like the concept of efficiently managing business professionally is against of the interests of those to blindly believe in the words of politician implanted grassroots movements.

Last time I checked, it was not a crime to drive a European car in the United States while rooting for American TURBINE, HARDDRIVE, AEROSPACE engineering while booing down the unions of the American auto industry combined with the executives getting cozy with Congress for tarrifing imports. I guess in some people's minds, anything that insults their political views should be labeled as radical and then tried as a crime, then be executed. Right, lets live in the American Dystopia like science fiction novels have explored!

However, as I am one of those classical pesudoanarcholibertariancapitalist thingies that nobody else likes, I will go enjoy my weekend by completing some business in the name of Adam Smith and the invisible hand of our recovering (But slowly) economy all while optimizing my life but balancing it to ensure that nothing runs into far boundaries. Strangely I also believe in taxes, weird how that works huh?

Must be those darned Priuses blasting their smugaura at me when I'm getting 35MPG using a 230HP engine on the local roads in my non American made car with a company that used to have their US HQ based in Norcoss, GA! Maybe I look like one of those liberal thingies.

Wait, is enjoying 2,000+ dollar handguns that are able to shoot close to MOA accuracy considered an alternative view? I guess we should ban those and replace them with Makarovs then, glory to commonly accessible firearms to all citizens, concealable but lethal enough that you might as well throw them at people instead of shooting them.

Oh by the way, you forgot Ball Aerospace in that list of companies that make extremely important. Just like you forgot General Dynamics. (You know, GD Land Systems? Abrams?)

Moderators: Please, this isn't trolling moreso than just super satire, if you can see the playfulness in this post compared to the seriousness of the subject if not my hypocritical views straying into the insane? I even got chuckles off some people who may or may not agree with what I say but find my sarcasm to be entertaining. I'm hoping everyone is mature enough to understand my well meaning.

On topic: Thinkpads were built in Mexico at one point. (Check the classic century series Thinkpads) Frankly I would not trust an American built HP over a "Chinese Thinkpad" seeing they're engineered at Yamato Labs in Japan with Lenovo's HQ being within the US. Economically if they're able to pass the savings onto us by having lower introduction prices to make Thinkpads available to more people, then let it be!