On Wednesday 30 August 2006 11:25, Dieter wrote: > > > > We certainly don't want a lot of switches on the card. > > > > > > Gee, why not? They are three dimensional! > > > > Because they are god damn expensive! > > > > If you have ever worked in hardware manufacturing > > bussines, you know that adding a part that just costs > > $0.01 will add up to $1 to $10 on the final product cost. > > What are you building, a mars rover? With a 1000x markup, > putting a $100 CPU into a computer would raise the price by > $100,000. Even for products that are very high quality, very > low volume, with lots of engineering overhead, and little > competition, the markup is "only" about 5x. For higher volume > products, the markup is *far* *far* less. While I wouldn't > count on OGC selling in Wall-Mart quantities, it should easily > sell in volumes far higher than the 5x markup products I'm > thinking of. The markup had better be well under 2x or the > price will make it unsellable.
There are large _fixed_ per-part, per-board costs. For each variety of part you use, there are stocking fees depending on the volume, mass and quantity of the part used. There are assembly fees, both of the fixed (one-off tooling setup) and per-board (esp. for hand-assembled through-hole parts) varieties. There's extra testing required -- in order to test the DIP switch function, for example, you have to have a test rig that can short out the switches on demand, and in any case you have to _pay_ someone to make sure that the settings are correct for factory defaults before shipping the board. Same for jumpers. In fact the adding a $100 surface-mount CPU to a board might add $105 to the total cost, whereas adding a $5 heatsink for said CPU might add $15 to the cost. We're not talking about mark-up to make back money spent in R&D here. We're talking about the increase in manufacturing costs. The additional cost of the board due to adding an extra part is _not_ proportional to the actual price of the part. Jumpers/switches are indeed "god damn expensive" by the metrics that actually matter. (Yes, I'm pulling numbers out of thin air in my examples. Bite me. I have factory-floor experience of the mind-twistingness that is manufacturing.) Peter -- Fisher Society publicity officer http://tinyurl.com/o39w2 CUSBC novices, match and league secretary http://tinyurl.com/mwrc9 Quake II build tools maintainer http://tinyurl.com/fkldd v3sw6YChw7$ln3pr6$ck3ma8u7+Lw3+2m0l7Ci6e4+8t4Gb8en6g6Pa2Xs5Mr4p4 hackerkey.com
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