On 6/18/2014 9:25 AM, Ralph Mowery wrote:

"Julie Bove" wrote in message
...
Has this become very common lately? I know that dollar stores have always
sold Chinese crap and I have avoided that. But recently I ordered an
extra wall plug in for our Iphone 5's and it wasn't an Apple product.
Ordered from Ebay. Never again. The thing was a joke! The prongs on it
looked

Aren't the I phones made in China ? I know some Apple products are.

It is just like most everywhere else, there are some good China items and
some junk items.

The major issue is cheap counterfeits marketed as the genuine article.
If they're not marketed as genuine/OEM parts, then it is strictly
buyer beware. There are wide variances in quality of manufacture and
you have no way of knowing if it is a quality product before
purchasing it. An awful lot of third party electrical/electronic goods
manufactured in China are either not UL certified or have counterfeit
UL certifications.

When a foreign company to contract with a Chinese manufacturer to
produce their product, it's fairly common for the manufacturer to not
only manufacture the genuine product, but to then make and sell
knockoff versions of the product, usually produced with inferior
materials or modified designs. Worst case scenario is when the Chinese
manufacturer sees the market opportunity for a new product from a
small overseas company and steals the design and market share by
making and marketing their own versions of the product while
deliberately stalling the production of the official product for that
company that came up with it in the first place. That happened to a
small local company in my area.

Intellectual property theft is huge in China. It's one of the prices
companies pay for having their goods produced there. Basically, for
every legitimate unit produced, they can expect to have a number of
illegitimate units produced, sold out the back door, and competing
with their own products.