To support your point, most of the delays in the JackPair Kickstarter involve tooling for the casing. The recent one admits they should've talked to an expert before they even settled on the prototype because they had no idea how much trouble it would cause at manufacturing time.

Hence, the popularity of the Design for Manufacturing concept these days...

Tooling and injection molding is an arcane art. Most people would be amazed to realise that the tooling to make even the yubikey would probably be around 45cm x 45cm of (almost) solid steel block.

They'd be probably even more surprised to find that it'd cost 10k - 15k to make the tooling.

Diagnosing / 'debugging' issues with injection molding is incredibly difficult - again - it's almost black magic, and it's sadly a skill that's getting harder and harder to find.

If you cast your eyes around your desk / room, we see molded plastic parts every where - so we make the assumption that they must be cheap and easy to do.

And indeed - the assumption of facility due to availability is a very common trap that many kickstart projects fall into.

It's harder to scaffold and pivot in real life ;)

I believe it. Sounds like a market rife for disruption by people that can turn it into a cookbook approach on the cheap. More interesting from a security angle: malicious tooling on packaging side might be used to pre-compromise chips or devices. I haven't seen anyone write on that and I've had to little time to do a paper on it. I'm sure there's a whole cat and mouse game waiting on us that the cats are probably already playing. ;)

Apple justified their purchase of a Cray in part for this use case.

That's something else. You got a link for that?

Nope, just contemporaneous memory, and by then I'd learned a lot about manufacturing by working at LMI, so it was something I paid attention to. Try e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+cray+injection+molding... which got me these two top hits:

ftp://ftp.cray.com/announcements/product/OLD/Moldflow_Partnership.930408.txt

http://www.clock.org/~fair/computers/sgi-cray.html

The latter should be authoritative, Eric Fair was an Apple sysadmin in the '80s or thereabouts (and son of the Fair in Fair Issac, the inventors of credit scoring).

And there were quite a few more links I didn't check out.

That's a trip! I didn't consider the need for a supercomputer because I knew so little about the topic. Yet, the text file reminds me of the descriptions on solving fluid dynamics problems where they had to do intensive simulations to measure behavior of fluid in some situation. That's always advertised by supercomputer vendors. Seems molding has similar requirements.

Extra funny if that exchange between Scully and Cray happened. One of computing's more interesting synchronicities. :)

Btw, I recently found out that Cray had another company making a play in reconfigurable market. He died in a car accident but they followed through with interesting technology:

http://srccomputers.com/

I would say your 5000 USD for the tooling seem pretty low to me for a steel mold (as opposed to a "soft" aluminium mold). They can easily cost 5-10x more if you factor in mold development.

For full disclosure, I work with factories (Based in China) running plastic injection molding and zinc casting molding.

5kUSD would be a conservative price from our factories; but the item is rather simplistic. As a general rule of thumb, for cases in plastic injection molding, you're correct - you're looking at 10 - 20k easily. Multiple pieces with complicated gating, the price goes up.

Zinc / Metal injection molding involves much more black magic, and this is reflected in the costs.

With all of that said - we're in complete agreement on the main subject - even if tooling cost 5k + 20c per piece, the estimation of $1 for PCBA + PCB Stenciling + molding is way off track, unless it was amortised over tens / hundreds of thousands of pieces.