Right. The guy who works for Corsair, in selling cases, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
he is working in sales. He’s a fukken ad man. I believe Tek made LianLi factory video or something before… you can see clearly its bs.
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Totally, what a moron.
I have provided evidence from a reputable source about what a case costs and how businesses work.
You have provided nothing and rest on some laurels about what you think it should cost when in fact this is not true. The final cost is not equivalent to the cost to produce; for some reason, you refuse to accept this.
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but again, and again you are missing point. You stated they don’t have tooling at all since everything is done in china. so they cannot charge customer 20-30$ extra for ‘materials’ to be from usa. so they didn’t take a loan, and they pretty much sell them only.
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Nowhere in their storefront are the products brandished with “made in the USA”.
they brandish themselves as self-made Californian american company since 1971. that got plenty of contracts from electronic, military, medical, and industrial applications.
they imply they are made in usa. You don’t see anywhere made in china either.
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@anon5205053 if you think that there was a clear and obvious way for them to be viable while making cases domestically, what motivation do you think they had for manufacturing overseas?
When I consider this, there are only 4 answers I can come up with:
a. They hate America.
b. They love China more than money.
c. They are hopelessly incompetent.
d. Chaos reigns.
It can be costly to move your manufacturing, we are seeing that in the UK where some companies (with the notice they have) are concerned they can’t have it done in time even with a surplus of money aside to do it.
I think you underestimate everything involved in this.
They have also likely gone wrong somewhere with their business.
Both can be true at the same time .
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Thermaltake is just going to pick up the slack. Maybe the Core W cases will actually improve in quality,
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It’s funny.
Back when that hole debacle went down, I said “Caselabs is dumb for not partnering with TT to make cheaper versions for a cut of the sales.”
Still, this sucks. I can’t find their drive cages on Amazon.
Apart from @anon43920604, any other forum members who’s reading this article and own a Caselabs case, please do not sell it. There won’t be any more “consumer-orientated” cases whose design is as divided as Caselabs’, despite the cost of their attractive options though. It’s a really shitty decision they had to go with nonetheless. If I wanted to get rid of my Corsair 900D for an alternative, I would personally go for their case. Nobody else these days are making cases that is a far-cry from one another. Nobody is catering to the real tech nerds of the “#pcmr” community. All they care about is the aesthetics, pop trashy culture, lighting so elliptically nauseating it can be seen from 1000 light years away and the e-peen metrics.
Now that Caselabs is out of business, wonder if me or someone would start a project where they take 2 widely-available average-sized cases and conjoin them together. And really importantly, maybe harvest an external 5.25" drive cage from a Caselabs case (RIP) and weld/rivet/bolt/screw into the case, along with cutting out the front panel to accommodate an external 5.25" device. Call me 1980s but personally that’s how I would roll.
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RE: the China = cheap argument is a flawed one at best. You can get quality anywhere but it’s also not cheap anywhere.
Even if Caselabs didn’t own the tooling it still must be paid for, and the smaller the run, the more of that cost is eaten up in consumer pricing. I worked directly in progressive die manufacturing (you know, all those tooling setups in GN’s videos) for a while, but ours made hundreds of thousands, or even millions of parts in their lifetimes. Sometimes hundreds of thousands per month.
That’s what you’ll find in production in the US, where automation is simpler and cheaper than hiring a press operator that has many indirect costs in addition to a paycheck.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they talked to stamping shops about moving production and got laughed at for their quantities, which I can’t imagine were more than a few thousand at most.
Sad to see a niche product go away though. Hopefully they release all their designs publicly and don’t just sell them to some other case manufacturer to be cheapened to the nth degree.
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CaseLabs manufactures high-end computer chassis for enthusiasts made completely from aluminum. Proudly owned, operated, and built in the USA.
https://twitter.com/CaseLabsUSA
I don’t believe tariffs, as they claim, are the reason they are going out of business, they’ve been having trouble fulfilling orders since before the tariffs started. And if they are made in USA, the tariffs wouldn’t apply.
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Go on Twitter and rip them apart for spreading fake news
Made in Chyyyyyna, assembled in the US of A.
The bigger cases aren’t even assembled, they come flat packed with a “Made in USA” sticker on the box.
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You get what you pay for from China or anywhere though sometimes you pay for what you don’t get ie Apple.
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Exactly. You ever go to a wedding and the food sucks? That’s because the people paying for it didn’t opt to get the good stuff. China is a huge country and they make some of the highest quality products in the world. But you pay for that. You buy the cheap crap off aliexpress or gearbest, and you get what you pay for.
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can’t say I’m surprised at a cost of umpteen million dollars per case and a lack of product diversity (in aesthetics not compatibility) only takes the smallest hiccup to bone a company like that.
So it seems there’s some confusion here?
Nowhere that I’ve seen does it say they were made in China. The tariffs could just have played a role in the cost of the raw aluminum, which of course would contribute substantially to the higher cost and eventual closure. They also said a shortage which further leads me to believe that China is is simply the source of their aluminum rather than the home of their factory.
Assuming that is correct then it makes perfect sense why the company had to close down because the costs of manufacturing such a large and modular case in the USA from thick aluminum is incredibly high, particularly when looking at start-up costs.
Certainly poor management of the business contributed, no company goes down under good management of course. They were unable to diversify over the course of almost a decade, and only had 20,000+ customers over that time. A niche product and market, partly prohibited by price, rather boring aesthetic, and the difficulty of purchasing such a modular product all contributed greatly.
When the raw materials skyrocketed in price they declare bankruptcy, which shows they were not making as large a margin as some seem to believe.
Again, this is assuming their manufacturing was handled in the USA (which it really should be to avoid problems with the FTC) and China was simply the source of their aluminum. Which is what I believe is the case as I’ve not seen anywhere that their cases are made in China.
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