Dell Inspiron 14Z-5423

The keyboard cover was interesting because it seems so simple, so uncomplex. It is one complete piece, with only two stickers. One simply says, Made in China, while the other actually says the date, with a Chinese symbol. I downloaded the Google Translate app and it said "Night" which adds specificity to the time that the chip was created. It's interesting because there were two different companies engraved upon the inside, Mitsubishi and MiTAC, one located in Japan and the other located in Taiwan, both of which were not made in China. I had to do some investigating.  Using the markings on the back of the board, I found a list of MiTAC's products, and found that they made keyboard covers. Success! Yet, why was Mitsubishi involved? It turns out that Mitsubishi is a Japanese car design company. Since the keyboard cover was on the outside of the computer, it had to have a certain look. That's where Dell decided to hire Mitsubishi, to make everything clean cut and orderly, and I verified this hypothesis on the pdf of Dell's content suppliers. They don't just hire manufacturers, they also hire designers, which makes a lot of sense for such a visible piece of the laptop's matrix.

Oh, the motherboard, arguably one of the most important pieces of the laptop itself. Large and full of complex imagery, this item was by far the most difficult to locate. It has what seems like thousands of tiny numbers written all over it, with two stickers that mimic the stickers that are on the keyboard cover and the USB reader chip. Every single connection has an identifier, and each additional piece, like ports or other sorts of connectors, all have different manufacturer. The hard part of finding the origin of the motherboard was trying to find the main information of the actual motherboard, and not all the tiny additional pieces made by what seemed like thousands of different manufacturers. In the end, the answer was quite large and big, as INTEL was labeled largely on the front of the circuitry. It also had a Made in China label, and since INTEL only has one factory in China, I made the logical conclusion that this is where it must have been produced. It had a simple date code, and whamo, Dell manufactured a motherboard. It was actually the same Intel factory that Emma's wireless card was created at, which I found interesting.

The USB/Audio/SD card reader was the least interesting piece to research. Like the other two pieces, it had two stickers with the unique identifier and part number, as well as date. There was nothing on the chip itself to suggest that other manufacturers were involved, like with the other two pieces, so finding the origin of this piece ended up being more straightforward. I figured that since the only markings on the piece were "Dell" and Dell unique indentifiers and product numbers, it must have been made at a Chinese factory that Dell had control of.  After doing some research on the PDF of Dell's suppliers, and therefore also their factories in China, I found the collection of card readers that this piece was a part of, and thereby also the factory location in China.

Like Abby seemed to have found when she was doing her research on her parts, when I googled Chinese Dell factories before looking at the factory supply list pdf, I found some disturbing news articles about Chinese labor laws. It seemed as though Dell was mistreating their workers, and that a few had been protesting at that particular factory. As a result of this scandal, as of 2016 Dell has made a point of trying to be more straightforward with where and how their products are being made, and how they are treating their suppliers. However, if this is them being more straightforward, I can confidently say that it was not easy to find the location of the pieces made strictly by Dell, as if they are trying to cover something up that happened before 2016, maybe even 2012, the year this laptop was made. These types of scandals and inhumane treatment of workers are always a possibililty, especially with multi-million corporations looking for cheap labor anywhere they can find it.