Re:Update On The TechCrunch Tablet: Prototype A
by mechanical_fish on Sunday August 31, 2008 @02:18PM
(#291452)
Well, sure, but those serious manufacturing resources belong to OEMs in China. As a US-based designer, building a factory is not your problem -- there's no hope of doing that profitably at this rock-bottom $200 price point. Your problem is design -- figuring out which combinations of commodity parts will do what you want. After which you'll take various iterations of your prototype to meetings with OEMs like Foxconn, asking them to bid for the honor of manufacturing the product in bulk and sticking your company's label on it.
Of course, there are lots of potential pitfalls in that process -- there are several middlemen who can mark the price up, there are lots of suppliers to coordinate and play against each other, and there's the constant risk that your design is lousy, or unmanufacturable (when the factory is half a world away, it's hard to establish a good design feedback loop), or that you'll cut so many corners trying to meet your budget that your brilliant design turns out lousy. This is presumably why there are so few decent $200 web tablets.
Incidentally, though I used to be a product engineer in the cellular components industry, I'm no expert on the overall design/manufacturing process -- I was a tiny cog in the giant cellphone machine. For actual knowledge I recommend something like Bunnie Huang's blog posts about hiring folks to build the Chumby:
UPDATE: I just surfed through my own link, and I have to say that Bunnie is a great blogger. His hints for getting quality designs out of Chinese factories (my capsule summary: "live in China, watching the assembly line, for as much time as you and your budget can stand") are in line with my own experience.
Of course, there are lots of potential pitfalls in that process -- there are several middlemen who can mark the price up, there are lots of suppliers to coordinate and play against each other, and there's the constant risk that your design is lousy, or unmanufacturable (when the factory is half a world away, it's hard to establish a good design feedback loop), or that you'll cut so many corners trying to meet your budget that your brilliant design turns out lousy. This is presumably why there are so few decent $200 web tablets.
Incidentally, though I used to be a product engineer in the cellular components industry, I'm no expert on the overall design/manufacturing process -- I was a tiny cog in the giant cellphone machine. For actual knowledge I recommend something like Bunnie Huang's blog posts about hiring folks to build the Chumby:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=6
UPDATE: I just surfed through my own link, and I have to say that Bunnie is a great blogger. His hints for getting quality designs out of Chinese factories (my capsule summary: "live in China, watching the assembly line, for as much time as you and your budget can stand") are in line with my own experience.