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A comment on Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list? by dhash on Friday May 22, 2020 @10:32PM (#23279317)
Best part is the Oxford devices are _actually affordable_. Illumina has had such a stranglehold on the market - devices start at around 35k and go up into “this is a house now” territory. Meanwhile the Flongle [0] is $99 and the main Oxford device can be had for $1k.

[0] https://store.nanoporetech.com/us/flowcells/flongle-flow-cel...

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Re:Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list? by bsder on Saturday May 23, 2020 @01:02AM (#23280057)
> Illumina has had such a stranglehold on the market - devices start at around 35k and go up into “this is a house now” territory.

You cannot effectively sell this kind of device under $25K--support costs simply eat your profit margin.

This is a constant across industries. You either have a $250 thneed (and you ignore your customers) or a $25K thneed (and you have shitty customer support) or a $250K thneed (and you have decent customer support).

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Re:Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list? by zmmmmm on Saturday May 23, 2020 @07:20AM (#23282028)
Depends what you mean by affordable - low barrier to entry, yes. But bases / $ is still orders of magnitude below where needed to displace Illumina for sequencing of large genomes (eg: human).
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