Quote:
Originally Posted by Rod#S
What's being made in China have to do with anything?
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It has nothing to do with anything if I'm buying an iPad, but it matters to me. These aren't commodity off the shelf boomboxes. If you're paying luxury dollars for luxury products... the SAME luxury dollars you paid before if not more, for the company to build products in a facility that costs *THEM* less money but those savings aren't passed on to YOU. What the hell is the point? I have made this exact same argument over on the Bang and Olufsen forums where it's even MORE egregious. Those are sold as not just audio, but luxury lifestyle products from the word GO.
When I'm paying a premium for a product I don't personally care about saving the producing company money in production. For that matter I can just buy cheaper gear. Part of what I'm paying for is the higher cost of production and providing an economy for the skilled craftspeople and assembly workers in the home countries of those companies. If I pay you more for your luxury product, part of that luxury comes from knowing my product isn't being made alongside everyone else's commodity product.
That's not to say that I have a problem with LOWER end lines being produced in China. B&O's play line, B&W's iPod speaker things up to the CM Series, the Classe Delta line for example. Just not the primary lines. It's easy to articulate all day long that as long as the R&D is happening stateside or Canada or Denmark or whatever that the end product "will be just fine". But that's not what I'm paying you extra for. This was reinforced to me when I was selling my Classe CP-800 a while back and got numerous people who asked me "Is it the made in china or made in canada version?". Once I said China they'd just evaporate.
The simplest example of this is Rolex. If Rolex began producing watches in China today. Their business would crumble within months and anyone who says any different, regardless if the watch was "just as good as it was before" is smoking crack. I consider Classe and McIntosh similarly premium products. If I want Chinese made I'll just buy Emotiva and save *literally* thousands.
Fortunately, McIntosh so far have avoided this error.