Re:Hardware-as-a-Service
by bawolff on Friday October 30, 2020 @11:30PM
(#24948942)
This may be true, but i think keyboards are a bad example. Keyboards are generic, there's been very little innovation in a long time, everyone knows how to make a basically equivalent product. The only real distinguisher between competitors is cost. That's going to drive margins to be razor thin. But not because its hardware but because the type of product a keyboard is. You would probably see the same thing in the market for hammers, cutlerly, etc.
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Re:Hardware-as-a-Service
by bobthebuilders on Saturday October 31, 2020 @12:20AM
(#24949101)
Mechanical keyboards, not regular keyboards.
That's a wildly malformed market too.
You have a lot of oddities in the mechanical keyboard hobby.
* For a while there was a lot of rebranding. Three or four of the most popular boards a few years ago were fundamentally the same Costar CST-104 with different logos.
* Some of the legacy players (Cherry and Unicomp) were bankrolled by sales outside the enthusiast market.
* There's a huge number of hobby projects that overlap heavily. A million "40/60% with an aluminium case and takes MX switches" kits. I suspect this offers poor economies of scale and the ability to hide large margins.