While all us non-americans can gloat about what great consumer protection laws we have (and I'm very happy about them as a consumer!) it's not for no reason that all cool stuff is made by americans. They have the state of Delaware, and they have the government who prioritize business before social issues. Correlated (and if you ask me, causative (is that a word?)) is that most impressive companies and products are invented by Americans.

The main reason why "cool stuff" is made in America is because of massive government subsidy to the computer industry in the 50's, 60's and thanks to publically funded research (Bell labs, PARC etc). Again in the 80's under Reagan there was big investment in the computer industry as they recognized that Japan was starting to take the lead in tech industry.

My understanding is that both Bell Labs and PARC were owned and operated solely by large corporations (AT&T and Xerox, respectively). Do you have a source on government funding of either?

I don't know about the structure of PARC, but I suspect it's not quite as comparable to Bell Labs as you make it sound.

Weren't both of them funding some of their research projects via direct government (DARPA, etc) grants?

AT&T was a government monopoly. They had no meaningful competition that required rapidly innovating AT&T's core products, and they had lots of profit due to their monopoly status. They could afford to dump money into research (in addition to whatever gov't research grants they were getting) and still have plenty of profit left over. That's not quite government funding of research, but many economists will say that given its monopoly status, what it did was de facto government action.

PARC did some great things but they didn't have as broad a range of research as Bell Labs, did they? Xerox never had a monopoly like AT&T did, although I'm fairly sure they got plenty of government research grants.

There were also a lot of open fields in hardware and software that were just starting to be explored back then. Tech companies were investing plenty of brainpower and money into R&D, given little pushes by government grant availability. I think the difference in AT&T's case was the breadth of research due to how much profit they had... again, due to monopoly status.

I Wouldn't be surprised if the DOD was the biggest customer for both.. "subsidy" doesn't mean they were owned or directly financed.

Owned? No, it doesn't mean that.

Directly financed? I wouldn't call it a subsidy otherwise: https://www.google.com/search?q=subsidy&oq=subsidy

A subsidy can exist in effect when the terms are overly favorable and not at market rate.

PARC never had substantive DOD funding, it was funded by the largess of Xerox. Bell Labs did do government work, but was largely funded by the Bell Operating Companies, in the form of a royalty.

Exactly, the biggest research driver is military spending. Procurement is a huge way in which these companies were funded, eg the DOD bought 90% of computers in the 50's and 60's before they became viable as consumer devices in the late 70's.

PARC is heavily DARPA-funded today. In the 70s, PARC hoovered up a lot of Stanford grads who had been working on government funded projects at SRI. It's unlikely PARC would have been as successful without them.

Bell Labs was independent, but there are similar indirect links - lots of freshly minted PhDs cutting their teeth on government funded research, then moving into industry.

Government seed funding was directly responsible for the Whirlwind and TX series projects, for IBM's SAGE system, for the work of important consultancies like Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, and the various ACs (Illiac, Multivac, etc) all of which laid the foundations of modern computing.

IBM, DEC, and eventually Apple and MS productised that work, but it simply wouldn't have happened without government support.

You might be interested in a book called The European Revenge, written in 1973 by two writers from the Economist magazine. It made the argument that some day in the near future, European auto makers, such as Mercedes Benz and BMW, would be able to make automobiles that were as good as American automobiles.

And they were correct. Mercedes Benz and BMW did eventually catch up to the Americans. Nowadays, many people would argue that Mercedes Benz and BMW represent a level of quality that is much higher than what you can get from American automobiles.

If Europe hasn't yet caught up to the USA in consumer electronics, perhaps that is because Europe hasn't yet made the concerted effort to catch up.

I'd argue that as far back as the 30's European manufacturers were making cars every bit as good as those made in America.

That said, they were and are made to a different design ethos - American cars have never been designed for balanced performance like German cars have, they instead have been designed for comfort and trouble-free operation (meaning next to no maintenance). America long made the only car in the world that could go 100,000 miles with nothing but fluid changes, and other wear items. No European car can really do that, all of the German makes have a pretty aggressive preventative maintenance schedule.

Japan to an extent does build cars to the american ethos - they build to the American ethos, but localized to the Japanese market to a greater or lesser extent -but then again they were taught car building by the Americans after WWII - which is I think why Japanese cars have been so successful in the American market.

I can't seem to find a book of that title, can you be more specific? Thanks!

Or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12428925

Europe caught up, but the USA didn't stop, and now Europe is behind again.

Rather the cool stuff is made by the Chinese and Koreans, although sometimes according to American designs.

apart from cars (discussions about Tesla are in another recent thread, others are not really worth mentioning) and couple of other stuff from europe/east asia from nearly any aspect of life, I tend to agree

> it's not for no reason that all cool stuff is made by americans

Damn straight - American TV's sure are the coolest of all!

Yeah, you're right. Vizio is great.

Just bought a 50" 4K TV from them. It only supported Dolby's HDR out of the box. Firmware update added HDR10 support. The last time Sony, Samsung, etc decided to put the customer first in a stupid format war was... when exactly?

> Yeah, you're right. Vizio is great.

You might have missed this headline from July: "Vizio acquired by Chinese tech company LeEco for $2 billion"[1]

1. http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/26/12286756/leeco-buys-vizio-...

Well son of a...

Yeah, I missed that.

When they pretty much killed off the American TV industry.

TVs were considered cool maybe like, 50 years ago?

Are you being sarcastic?

> Are you being sarcastic?

Yes. I thought the sarcasm was self-apparent as the "all American TV manufacturers are shuttered" trope is well-worn and well-known (apparently not). A quick test would have been trying to think of one cool American TV model.

There's no free lunch. What are the trade-offs? Do you pay more for the same devices than in other countries?

This extended warranty thing is common throughout the EU (in the UK it's 6 years for example). In the UK we pay more than the US for most things but it's hard to pin down the exact reasons and price differences.

"..it's hard to pin down the exact reasons and price differences"

Generally it's down to VAT @ 20% and import duties, with some exchange rate padding.

Example:

Apple iPhone SE is £359 in the UK and $399 in the US.

As of 15:00 on 06/09, the $399 is ~£298. Add 20% VAT and you have ~£358.

EDIT: Exchange rates play a big part.

In the last couple of years the Sale of Goods Act protections were weakened as part of bringing us into line with Europe. It's now been replaced by the Consumer Rights Act which although clearer gives fewer rights to refund from the seller.

Note it's the retailer rather than manufacturer who is liable, so we have much more confidence that what we buy is "of merchantable quality", safe and legal to sell. Quite a number of HN threads have made this advantage clear.

Yes it's manufacturer for the first year (or two possibly) and after that it falls to the retailer.

No, they seem to about comparable i think. Electronics is generally ok priced here.

I have no idea about apple prices in general, but a "Apple iPhone 6s Plus 128GB Sølv (Silver)" is approx 1257 USD including 25% VAT. That is about 1/3 of an average monthly salary here, maybe a bit less.

Edit: country is Norway

For comparison: it's $949 + sales tax in the US, and 1075€ ($1200) in Germany, including 19% VAT. So the German price without VAT is the same as the Norwegian without VAT.

Mandatory warranty in Germany is 2 years, where in the first six months the manufacturer has to prove that it wasn't defective when they sold it to you if they want to dispute your claim. After six months, there's a reversal in the burden of proof, but claims are usually accepted without dispute. I'm not aware of anything that requires more than two years of warranty here, even for durable goods expected to last longer than that.

> Mandatory warranty

> the manufacturer has to prove

Just nitpicking: the mandatory warranty ("Gewährleistung") is supplied by the seller, not the manufacturer. As a consumer you don't need to deal with the latter no matter what the former is trying to tell you. In the same line, the burden of proof after six month is on the seller not the manufacturer.

A manufacturer often has an additional voluntary warranty ("Garantie") distinct from that.

That is the case (including the role of the seller) across the whole EU by Directive 1999/44/EC (although member states can go beyond that and often do by e.g. extending the time).

It is the same here, you never deal with the company, just send it to the store and they handle it from there.

The five or two year warranty is called "Reklamasjonsrett" in Norwegian which covers design and manufacturing flaws. It also states that the seller can try to fix it three times, after that it needs to give you something equivalent (i.e. a new phone of at least the price of the old) and that they can't charge the customer for any ting relating to the repair.

But we also have the "Garanti" from the manufacturer like you do.

Oh yes you're absolutely right - it's easy to conflate or confuse the two, even if they're quite different.

Corporate profits aren't as high.

What country do you live?

Probably a small french city named: Aille-en-Faune-six

Wow, tough crowd :)

And then people in your country probably get all upset when things cost way more. See "ripoff Britain" or all of the controversy in Australia. Your politicians won't break you the hard truth, but the reason why you pay more is that it's more expensive to sell to you.

Are you really claiming that expectation for a piece of hardware to work more than 2 years is something that hugely increases costs?

We're not talking 15 years here. 2 years.

Apple charges $99 for the two year warranty in the states. You get that "free" in Europe. Add in all of the other regulatory burdens, labor laws, and such, and it's very easy to see why things cost more in the rest of the Western world.

As a perfect example, they're likely on the hook for many millions of dollars of repairs with this issue in the article in the EU. In the US, only the people that had the problem early on or bought the extended warranty are covered. There ain't no free lunch.

So you're claiming that Apple's manufacturing is SO BAD that the they have to charge a full additional 99$ (more than 1/10th of the price) just guarantee that your Apple device will work for 2 years? Or do you perhaps think that there's another reason (PROFIT!) there?

Actually, looking at Apples stock performance I'd easily say that this is just about demanding normal decency from Apple.

They come to Europe to sell phones and we demand that they compete on the same terms as anyone else here.

Edit:

> they're likely on the hook for many millions of dollars of repairs with this issue in the article in the EU.

They can expect no mercy ;-)

They are big enough that they should know about key concepts like QA, continuous improvement and insurance.

That's all fine and dandy, but it isn't free. That's the point I'm making.

Apple made $7.6 billion USD in net income in the last quarter; I'm pretty sure they have plenty to cover the cost of repairs because of poor manufacturing quality.

That's not how it works. They're going to sell it for as much margin as any given market can optimally support. This is basic supply and demand.

Agree.

Additionally letting Apple (and other big companies)[0] clean up their own mess creates a perfectly aligned incentive to avoid messing with consumers again.

Edit: clarify

[0]: I actually like big companies. It's mostly just when they, -in spite of massive profits, do stupid things e.g: like whining against basic worker or consumer protection etc that they annoy me.

With regard to Australia; in 2013 there was a parliamentary inquiry into IT pricing entitled "At what cost? IT pricing and the Australia tax". The report can be found here, on the Parliament of Australia website.

http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hous...

Warranties (sections 3.24 to 3.27) are mentioned as one of many factors.

Yeah, as an American this sucks. My aunt had this issue and was similarly told to buy another iphone because the "1 year limited warranty doesn't cover this". Took less than 5 minutes on the phone for her to get her money back through amex. Chargebacks are a godsend to us unprotected American consumers. I doubt the chargeback hurt apple much, but any little extra expense to them makes me happy.