Comment by xp84

> There should be a quality improvement that goes along with the location and price increase.

> what that used to imply

This last part hits the nail on the head. The quality difference is mostly a fantasy. While the long tail of random aliexpress/temu junk suggests there's some big quality difference, it's more that those are random small businesses operating without any regulations, reputational concern, or legal liability and incentivized to make stuff cheap.

If you think about the things most people buy from real brands, the quality argument against Asia is preposterous, since not only are the products made in Asia quite high quality, but America has essentially zero slack in the skilled labor market as it is. We literally could not build a device to the quality standards of Apple or Samsung because everyone in America who could conceivably do so already has a job building cars or specialized, very expensive industrial products.

Now, people do complain that everything is crappy and made to fall apart just as the 90-365 day warranties expire. But that's not China being too dumb to make it correctly -- it's made perfectly to spec most of the time. It's the designers of the products (often in the US) optimizing their profits by using the cheapest, worst parts and unrepairable designs. If anything, moving production to a high-labor-cost country would increase the pressure to cut any corner possible.