My son is looking for a nice electric guitar for Christmas now that he has fulltime work. He has been looking around and gravitating towards a strat, HSS.
 
I suggested perhaps the new Fender American Professional Stratocaster HSS e.g. http://www.musiciansfriend.com/guitars/fender-american-professional-stratocaster-hss-shawbucker-maple-fingerboard-electric-guitar
 
He is also looking at Mexican strats at ~ 1/3 the price.
 
If he goes the latter, any drawbacks or naysayers or critical mods? Any suggestions? Anything better (within the same price range) than the Fender from custom luthiers, etc?
 
Thanks!

I bought and upgraded a mexi-strat and, when it was done, I'd spent about as much as an HSS would have cost, but I did get to pick my own parts. Most of the cost was in custom wound pickups. I'm very happy with it.
 
Regards,
Dan

I have a mid 2000s MIM as my only Strat. I went into the shop expecting to leave with a US one but that particular MIM, out of the 30 or so Strats I tried, really sang and resonated when not plugged in and felt by far the most comfortable.

As it left the factory it wasn't bad apart from a dreadfully cut nut, but the US ones I tried weren't much better. Fender seem to have got better on that front though.

I didn't like the Mexican pickups - they had ceramic bar magnets and sounded harsh and buzzed quite a lot. And the trem was about as reliable as an unreliable thing.

So I switched the pickups for a set of Lace Sensor Hot Gold and replaced the nut with a Graphtec teflon impregnated one. I also switched the trem block from the cast pot-metal for a Callaham 50s spec steel one which improved sustain and treble. I also fitted a tremsetter in the trem cavity so it can float enough to give a semitone up-bend and still consistently return to tune.

Overall it probably cost me about the same as a US Standard of the time. But had I bought a US Standard or Deluxe I'd still have wanted to change the pickups and probably the trem block as well.

Some of that probably qualifies as "cork sniffing", so I'd say the only thing that affected the playing other than the usual Strat trem stability issues was the factory nut. And it needed a setup of course.

My most recent Fender is a 2015 Wilko Johnson signature Tele, one of a limited release of 200 for Europe and Japan only. It's basically the 1960s vintage rosewood-board, alder body MIM in a non-standard colour scheme. It plays superbly and sounds like a vintage Tele should. I set the action and intonation and otherwise I feel no need to change anything.

And it cost less than the "regular" model for some reason. Maybe black with a red scratchplate is a really cheap finish to apply or something.

You could do far worse than a MIM Fender.

Avoid Korean-built Fender though. I've a Lite Ash Tele I bought online that left the factory with the bridge plate askew far enough to trap the strings so they couldn't be pulled through the body. The body string holes were in the right place but the bridge securing screws had been put in at a diagonal angle that meant the bridge was in the wrong place and at the wrong angle. Easy enough to fix in an hour by plugging the holes and re-fitting the screws where they should have been.

And the neck needed shimming to correct the fingerboard angle and levering sideways a bit in the pocket to get it perpendicular to the body. Overall a really shabby bit of work on what is some very nice wood fitted with Duncan pickups. All easy to fix in an hour or two you know what you're doing, and no worse than some seventies Fender
production, but it should never have left the factory like that. I've seen a few horror stories about other Korean Fenders, which is a bit surprising as the Korean factories can and usually do build perfectly good guitars for the price asked.

From experience.. don't buy guitars from a on line shop. Or at least approach with caution. Buy from a store where you can try it out. 
There's no music store where I live and because you can send stuff back, I tried the ordering on line routine. Two ended up going back as they where duds. One was a G&L which normally are excellent ( I have one already) but the set ups were out to lunch and even after I tried best I could  they were still not up to my standards. I sold the G&L to a musician who liked the way it looked and didn't seem to care about the string buzzes.   These where all $800 price range. In the end I just upgraded the pups on my Strat copy and all is good. 

Cactus Music
From experience.. don't buy guitars from a on line shop. Or at least approach with caution. Buy from a store where you can try it out. 

Even Sweetwater? Nonetheless, we are going to go to a local Guitar Center later this month when he comes home for Christmas before buying :)

Thanks all for the GREAT replies, just what I was hoping for. I still like that new American Series :)

I will say, the block and the pickups are the two most important things to get good tone out of it. I used a brass block and it rings now. I also used Lindy Fralin pickups which really smoothed out the tone, but they can get aggressive when I want them to. Tim is right that the lower end American strats aren't any better than the mexi-strats. They don't get really good until you are well over a $1000.
 
Dan

I never have bought a guitar from Sweetwater so not sure  possibly they do set up before shipping. Obviously Musicians Friend does not. They just move merchandise.  A real music store will take the guitar out of the box and look it over, 99% of the time set up is required. The guitar has just traveled from a sub tropical climate with mega humidity to what ever we have here. 
 
The guitars I bought 2 from Musicians friend and were basically untouched by human hands since they were packed in China. The necks were bowed and with a twist, Total junk. The G&L was the best and like I say I sold it to someone who fell in love with the way it looked.  
 
A good music store will set the guitar up for the average player, but if your fussy, they will send it in for that next level of set up at no charge.  
 
I owned a music store for 12 years and unpacked 100's of guitars, In those days ( the 90"s) most were from Korea. Turns out those were pretty good instruments compared to what we get from China now. At the end my stores brief history guitars were starting to come from Indonesia and those were garbage compared to domestic and Korean. The Korean guitars took very little set up time. Once Indonesia and China kicked in I was filing the edges of frets to make them playable. Grab any Chinese guitar and run your hand along the edge of the frets... Don't cut yourself. 
 
I'm sticking to North American made stuff. Godin, Gibson and Fender USA. My G&L is USA made. The ones I ordered were China so BIG difference,, shame on the companies who lower themselves to this.  

My only comment is I'm still playing my 1995 strat. Last night I was in a room with a guy playing his 1985 strat.
 
If you like it you might have it a while. Spread the cost over the years and I've been paying about a dime a day for my strat. No brainer.
 
Get one you dump after a couple of years and your cost per day may prove much higher. You should get one that plays good, feels good, looks good, and you can be proud of tomorrow. Be cautious of too much glitz. Glitz makes some people you might like scowl.

I've seen a couple of decent Chinese-built guitars, Selmer-Macaferri copies that are far from cheap. And an Indonesian made Fender electric mandolin that's fine. Also some rubbish as well.

The far-Eastern companies specialise in building to a price. Samick are maybe the biggest guitar manufacturer in the world in terms of number of instruments produced and make instruments for a wide range of companies. When paid to do an excellent job they can di an excellent job. When paid to churn out low-cost bargain-basement stuff that's what they churn out.

And it has to be said that a cheap guitar nowadays is usually far better than the cheap guitars of the 70s and 80s.

Buying guitars and basses on-line is like buying anything else that matters online. Recommendations from people who've been customers can be a good guide to who's likely to ship out a good instrument and who's less likely to. Back in the early 90s I worked a 20 minute drive from one of the best and largest guitar/bass/amps retailers and repairers in Europe, the much missed Musical Exchanges in Birmingham (that's Brum, England, not Birmingham anywhere else).

They sadly went the way of all things, and these days the local shop options are not so good. So online it pretty much has to be. Synths, pedals and amps are no problem bought online, either the electronics are working or they're not and if not send it back. Stringed instruments are more personal and it can take years to find out what suits you best.

I never expect to buy a guitar set-up the way I want and even in a shop I'm not really that interested in how well a guitar is set-up other than looking for obvious faults like humps in the fingerboard, badly installed frets or bridge and tuners that don't work properly. I was taught the basics of setup and maintenance about 30 years ago by someone who really knew what he was doing. So I can do all that stuff myself and I know what I like. Which no-one else really does. All my guitars have slightly different setups, and I play quite a bit of slide, which means super-low actions, a low nut and neck relief set for thin slinky strings are the last thing I want on a couple of my instruments anyway.

The good thing about electric guitars and basses, especially Fenders with bolt-on necks, is pretty much everything is adjustable with a screwdriver which isn't the case with acoustics. Well it is adjustable, but you might go through a few saddle blanks before carving one to the optimum shape, thickness and height.