What I find funny: the guy who runs STH frothing at the mouth about a typo. To paraphrase Nick Fury: "Pot, kettle."
The STH guy can't spell to save his life and his grammar is terrible. His sentence structure and general writing skills are about what I would expect from a fourth-grade child.
He also is an incredible drama-llama, making mountains out of molehills; I've seen him do this time and time again.
He sees a misprinted sticker and sees supply chain attacks? Dude. This gear is assembled by people in third world countries making wages that amount to a few dollars a day or less. They don't speak English. They may not even read roman letters. I'd challenge him to do QA on any non-roman alphabet...
I bet someone did notice the stickers, but getting them reprinted (assuming it was caught before assembly started) may have meant a delay. Even a minor delay can be a major, major problem since this stuff is scheduled practically down to the hour in the factories; ditto for shipping deadlines. Or if they were already on assembled boards (or worse, inside assembled equipment) the cost to replace the sticker would be astronomical, with exactly zero value to the vendor or their customers. It's cosmetic.
> The STH guy can't spell to save his life and his grammar is terrible. His sentence structure and general writing skills are about what I would expect from a fourth-grade child.
I mean, he acknowledges this:
> I make a lot of typos, so I know how it goes. As someone who is dyslexic, this piece is going to have a few typos when it goes live, so I empathize with this. At the same time, I tend to spell my name correctly on official documents.
In the electronics industry, a typo on a label, and especially in the brand name, is a very strong indicator that the product is counterfeit (AFAIK such mispellings are often deliberate to avoid using a trademark). For instance, fake Apple products are often "Designed by Apole in Colifornia". And while it's true that the products are most likely assembled by non-native English speakers, this sticker appears to include some licensing/serial number information and was probably designed by someone at corporate headquarters for the express purpose of certifying that the chip is genuine.
And the author places the bulk of the responsibility on Dell and AMI for not catching the error, rather than the workers at Foxconn or wherever. Counterfeit parts, supply chain issues, and cut corners are common, so engineers in the US closely inspect a random sample of boards received from the factories to make sure everything was built according to spec, which is where this should have been caught.
Having worked for a hardware company before, they were VERY particular about their hardware quality. They would frequently get engineering samples and do full teardowns on them to evaluate build quality. Those engineers were intimately familiar with the hardware. And these were toys. I would absolutely expect that high-end computer equipment goes through frequent engineering sample review. If they aren't doing that, then how are they ensuring the quality of the company doing the manufacturing?
By counting the number of returned items and service calls: that's way cheaper than upfront checking and in the short run will suffice. That's MBA logic for you.
Without further details, it's hard to tell. What I can imagine happened: Someone realized there is a typo. AMI was made aware of that. AMI did additional Quality Checks. Chips were in spec. Re-Labelling, after the fact, is expensive and time consuming. The batch got a concession, AMI probably paid less for that batch. All good.
In a case like this, it seems like a reasonable course of action. Assuming otherwise is borderline paranoiac.
The STH guy can't spell to save his life and his grammar is terrible. His sentence structure and general writing skills are about what I would expect from a fourth-grade child.
He also is an incredible drama-llama, making mountains out of molehills; I've seen him do this time and time again.
He sees a misprinted sticker and sees supply chain attacks? Dude. This gear is assembled by people in third world countries making wages that amount to a few dollars a day or less. They don't speak English. They may not even read roman letters. I'd challenge him to do QA on any non-roman alphabet...
I bet someone did notice the stickers, but getting them reprinted (assuming it was caught before assembly started) may have meant a delay. Even a minor delay can be a major, major problem since this stuff is scheduled practically down to the hour in the factories; ditto for shipping deadlines. Or if they were already on assembled boards (or worse, inside assembled equipment) the cost to replace the sticker would be astronomical, with exactly zero value to the vendor or their customers. It's cosmetic.