Posted by uliwitness:

“When it comes to Japanese PC manufacturers, their manufacturing plants will complain or add their own technical efforts to lower cost, if a proposed structural design was insufficient,” one of the engineers said. “The MacBook Air gives me an impression that its manufacturing plant packaged the computer exactly as ordered by Apple.”

Rainer,

thanks for posting this — it mirrors exactly the thoughts I had when I read this news bit, and now I don’t have to coherently blog about it anymore.

FWIW, from what I heard, this is a common thing with Asian manufacturers. They like to improve products, but since they usually don’t have the whole list of why something should be done this way and not another, the customer of these manufacturing plants isn’t always happy with that.

Some western companies have “solved” this by putting QA guys in place that will babysit the manufacturers and make sure stuff gets produced the way they requested it, for exactly that reason.

I guess this is a cultural issue that will have to be resolved by understanding each other…

Oh, BTW, also found your review of the FireWire power specs interesting. I was hoping someone with better electrical skills than me would eventually post the fundamental maths involved to prove/disprove the “No FireWire cuz it needs too much juice” theory that’s been bandied about.