Asus and Acer are Taiwanese, not Chinese, and none of them actually manufacture ... (2024)

Alienware is just owned by Dell now and seems to put out overpriced poorly built chunky machines that target gamers with too much money. Razer and Falcon NW might be better from the chassis design side, or Sager and Clevo from the OEM value side.

The Alienware laptop I had for a week or two a few years ago was the worst laptop I've ever used. Noisy and hot and expensive and poor ergonomics and just all around unimpressive, poor hardware masked by a once respected brand name.

To be fair, Wistron actually used to be the manufacturing division of Acer, until it was spun out ~25 years ago.

My first job out of college was at a US-based networking hardware company, and I was really surprised to learn that, even though most of the manufacturing & assembly is done in China, most of the electronics OEMs & ODMs are actually Taiwanese.

TSMC gets a lot of attention being as prominent as they are, but most people don't realize that the entire computing supply chain is Taiwanese. It's not just the silicon, that's just the tip of the Taiwanese iceberg.

Combine that with China having some manufacturing capacity of its own, China stands to lose far less than the west in a hypothetical war over Taiwan as far as computers go.

This response does not actually address the thrust of my comment. How is Apple able to put out very high quality hardware, even as it uses the same few factories that others use?

It is the customers of these factories that provide the designs and dictate the quality of manufacturing and tolerances that they want, no?

Isn't that because (modern Apple Silicon) Macs are vertically integrated? The Wintel stack is a Frankenstein and nobody has particularly good quality. Dell, HP, Alienware, Razer, Samsung, Sony etc. are generally all crap these days too. The Lenovo X series is quite a bit better than most American lines, but still not particularly impressive in terms of build. Microsoft's Surface Book line looks well designed but had a bunch of heating and power problems. Even my Intel Mac frequently has problems. My M1 one, on the other hand, is amazing, so far ahead of every other computer I've ever had.

On the Wintel side, I've had better luck with small biz machines (ThinkPad, not Lenovo, or Latitude) plus upgrades in home warranty, but honestly those break down too. They're just easier to fix.