Re:The amazing $1 microcontroller (2017)
by dalbasal on Thursday September 10, 2020 @05:38AM
(#24430542)
In some cases, I agree.
But to be operative in this way, you must be talking about a very high volume. Millions of units, or close.
My point was not that cost never matters, just that $1000->$100 is not the same as $10->$1. If your weather station startup is using $10 microcontrollers, getting that down to $1 is probably not important. If you are building 10 million weather stations, it is important, but this is a pretty specific scenario that doesn't apply often.
We say something similar with PC pricing. The cost of a functional PC never stopped falling, but that stopped being as important once a certain threshold was reached. Projects like RasberryPi do take advantage of continued cost reductions, but Pi is marginal relative to earlier cost reductions cause an explosion of PC use cases.
But to be operative in this way, you must be talking about a very high volume. Millions of units, or close.
My point was not that cost never matters, just that $1000->$100 is not the same as $10->$1. If your weather station startup is using $10 microcontrollers, getting that down to $1 is probably not important. If you are building 10 million weather stations, it is important, but this is a pretty specific scenario that doesn't apply often.
We say something similar with PC pricing. The cost of a functional PC never stopped falling, but that stopped being as important once a certain threshold was reached. Projects like RasberryPi do take advantage of continued cost reductions, but Pi is marginal relative to earlier cost reductions cause an explosion of PC use cases.