Rustpot
M Frame Lover
Like Batwolf said Oakley was following Apple's lead and not allowing quality to be affected. Again it was not a decision taken lightly, but supply was far below demand, action had to be taken.
That's laughable. There is a very big difference between Chinese and American engineering and manufacturing practices. Based on personal experience I can tell you Apple's Chinese assembly plant throws out a ton of faulty product every day. The last place I worked was doing a project for their caseback supplier and we requested 50 parts for testing. They gave us 100 "production run" (since that was how they were packaged) and we had to get 300 more before we had enough within tolerance to test with. I had to sit and take measurements and photograph my equipment to show them 70-something from the first batch were well off the mark.
Why do you think Apple's policy is to just give people a new phone all the time? They cost pennies to make and it's cheaper to hand over a new phone than pay the American labor to fix faulty components.
Another company I worked with rejects up to 25% of incoming shipments of generators from their Chinese and Taiwanese plants.
With the lower cost of labor and materials they can still afford to push production out fast and reject 50% of parts due to quality issues. Which is odd since there's more of a general "don't waste" mentality from the higher ups that will ship faulty product regardless and hope it passes, while the workforce is underfunded, undertrained, overworked, understaffed, undereducated... It's a pretty vicious environment in most Asian manufacturing facilities I'm familiar with.