Well cheap(ish) iPods do come at a price, but they could been even cheaper! They don't grow on trees or in the rice fields - they are assemebled by cheap very intellegent self-replicating robots. The robots are provided with good maintenance, fuel and regeneration time. They are operational only 35.7% of the time. Approximately 8.33% of the time they refuel, 33.33% of the time they spend in their regeneration cycle. Approximately 4.17% of their time is spent in a work preparation cycle. That is fine, but what are the robots doing the remaining 18.47% - not producing iPods for sure. That is gross negligence from the contractors! Of course, due to the cheap robot design, the fuelling and regeneration are nessesary, but the unused 18%-22% inefficiency comes from the pockets of the iPod shuffling public. So our beloved iPods can cost even less or have more features at the same price if the robot time was not wasted.
And if you consider the effects on the various laptops, TVsets, set-top boxes, consoles - we are grossly overcharged, because somebody doesn't do their job well - and doesn't reduce the inefficiencies in the workplace!
Well, if you consider that the iPod assembilng robots are (generally) over 16y old chinese workers, living in utopian areas with
"employee housing, banks, a post office, a hospital, supermarkets, and a variety of recreational facilities including soccer fields, a swimming pool, TV lounges and Internet cafes."
Do you really care? 18.47% is about 4.5 hours a day of free time. In which these people might try to get a life - unwind, socialise, have some fun, maybe find a partner...
The numbers are speculative, based on typical values for a human being - like 8 hours of sleep, 2 hours for food, ..., a day and a 60 hours of work per week.
The above was inspired by the post in the register:
Apple Computer has vowed to cease driving its Chinese iPod assemblers like rented mules, after being shocked, shocked, to learn of abuses at several of its overseas factories. The Mail on Sunday recently broke the story, and identified poor conditions at factories in Longhua and Suzhou, operated by Taiwanese outfits Foxconn and Asustek.
Apple relieves Chinese iPod slave laborers - the register
