There's a lot of very low volume niche Chinese phones for reasonable prices. So it doesn't need to be so expensive.

You could argue that an iPhone would cost over a billion because you need to develop iOS. But why would you do that instead of modding android for 1/100th of the cost, if you're only gonna make 40?

The hardware for the niche Chinese phones can only be so cheap, because an ecosystem exists around the mass production that is built around the mainstream iPhone and Android devices.

If not for the insane scale of phones being developed, the components that go into those cheap Chinese phones would be far far far more expensive than they are today.

This assumes the aircraft analogy uses all one-off parts, no? It would be interesting to see if there's any data available on this. I would expect big ticket items like the engines to be bespoke, but even they would likely use some common parts. I'd imagine it's not likely every seal or bolt would be unique to that airframe.

Cheap Chinese phones get to take the mass production benefits of the iPhone and Android markets and then *relax* most of the requirements to get cheaper parts.

The military tends to *tighten* the requirements when it’s procuring parts, so more things end up as custom development.

I have no idea what ratio something like an F-35 is for COTS vs custom hardware, though.

I’m not sure there’s much relaxing in quality control in aerospace. The specs are already pretty tight.

You could, but usually that causes lower performance. When building an airframe, a gram not needed is a gram wasted. In fighters it's far less stringent than spacecraft - for those, even a screw one turn longer than needed is something to avoid.

Those are technical specs, not quality specs. The quality specs would deal with things like machining tolerances, manufacturer traceability, etc.

Point being, if Pratt & Whitney took a seal design from another aircraft to apply to the F-35, it's not like they aren't already tracking the tolerances, material compatibility, etc. When I worked in aerospace, it was very rare that we went to the machine shop to ask for them to make a bespoke component.

it wouldn't be an iPhone then.

I'd love to have a civilian version of the F-35 for joyride operators, but I guess half of the point of a military aircraft is that your enemies can't buy one.

The Musk v Zuckerberg cage fight would’ve been much better as a dog fight between their private F-35s. I mean, why should mega billionaires fight the same way any two broke guys from Jersey would anyway?

I am quite sure they'd die before engaging. I'm not even sure they'd manage to take off and maintain steady flight.

There's a private company that has bought F-16s now. They do work with the military, but they're still a private company. If someone were able to get an F-16 and sell rides, I'd be willing to fork over a fairly absurd amount of money.

No, it wouldn't.

Scaling up a new TSMC node (only the iPhone 15 has this tech) is at least $10B alone. They spend $30B on capital per year.