Most US-based PCB manufacturers can do low-volume PCBs rather cheaply for you, but not quite at China prices. AdvancedPCB in the US has their "$33 each" which gets you a very quick turnaround on a pretty-good-tech 2-layer board for $100 total (minimum 3 boards). They do 4-layer PCBs for $66/board and they apparently also do RF materials for $100/board. Sierra Circuits, for example, also has similar prices. This is a market that exists.

This is not the price you get from China, but this is still a pretty damn good deal. When I was in college, $33 each was great (this was before JLC and PCBWay), and I would say the same for most hobby projects.

OSH Park has been doing 4 layer boards for at $10 per square inch for a set of 3 for years. Shipping included. 2 layer for $5/sq in. Much cheaper for anything but the largest boards.

It was actually only recently that China low volume manufacturing beat out OSH Park for very small boards once you factored in shipping.

At one point recently, I used OSH Park to make a PCB that was exactly 1 square inch, and I felt like I was stealing money from someone with how cheap it was.

For the record, college was more than 3 years ago for me, and $33/board (last I checked) does not beat any of the other prototyping services except at very large sizes - they go up to 60 sq in for that price.

That's not bad. Sierra and Protologix are much more expensive.

"Not quite at China prices" is something of an understatement. JLCPCB offer five 100mm*100mm 4-layer boards for $7. Not $7 each, $7 total for five boards. Shipping to Europe is $1.50.

For a company doing R&D, this difference is so small it hardly matters. It's less than an hour of an engineer's time.

If the whole Twitter -> X transition and DOGE has taught us anything, those costs don't magically disappear, they add up over time and get passed down as inflation. Are you really measuring an engineer's time properly? There is an implicit assumption that an engineers time is at 100% utilization which is never true. This mentality you described allows people to get sloppy with costs. At some point you need to do a form of Zero Based Budgeting.

In China, they compete with each other to get be the cheapest. Here (Bay Area) it feels like the PCB fab and assembly houses have decided to be higher priced because the defense contracts (and FAANG Quick turns) are willing to pay it.

I think your cause and effect is backwards. They target defense and FAANG R&D because there's no way you can compete on price when you have to pay your employees $20-30 an hour and you have to do small batches because you can't compete on price.

In China they are pushing automation. When you are charging $500+ a pcbs, you don't care as much.

The assembly houses have done this, but the American PCB fabrication companies often have a "slow and cheap" service. They definitely optimize for the defense market, though.

Chinese labour isn't that cheap anymore.

Chinese wages are higher than those in Mexico for example.

My impression, having visited the place, is that the Chinese laborers just work ridiculously hard. Part of this is due to culture and very heavy handed management, part of this due to the working class seeing huge returns on their labor (wealth has grown exponentially in their own lifetimes).

Don't know about China specifically, but "working ridiculously hard" is just "working" if everyone around is doing the same and you had no points of comparison.

If you've seen enough people graduating into non-working class, or you have had yourself, that changes your perspective.

I guess that would add credence to the culture element. All of east Asian shares in this practice really. Given a structure/framework in which to work productively, they tend to really crush it economically. However it seems this often comes at the expense of other aspects of society (underemployment, low fertility rates, elder poverty, deflation etc).

Looking broader at South East Asia, the Chinese minorities in countries around the region are know for working hard and being successful, often more so than other locals.

I'm inclined to think about it in terms of east Asians than strictly ethnically Chinese. You see the exact same attitudes to work in Korea and Japan. Confucianism is a powerful force in the region.

Suffice to say don't underestimate the work ethic and skill of Chinese laborers.

Going a bit on a tangent:

I grew up in Europe, but am now living in Singapore. It's interesting: despite all the PRC's advances and progress in the last few decades, they are still the poorest Chinese-majority country. You can go even wider, and look at countries with sizeable Chinese minorities, like Malaysia or Thailand, and I think you will find that the average ethnic Chinese person there also makes more than the average ethnic Chinese person does in the PRC.

I haven't checked the numbers for all of the relevant countries, but I think it's fair to say that by and large, PR China has the poorest ethnically Chinese people.

Similarly the UK is pretty much the poorest Anglo country. It seems to be a pattern where the most ambitious/productive types "boil off" to where there is more opportunity. I suspect this pattern is reflected with most diaspora groups.

It also begets the other, a place that has that opportunity attracts people who want to work, people who want to work build opportunity, attract more people, etc. Once you're in a death spiral of people who don't want to work and you're not specifically building socialism, you end up in this half functional dead state like my country (Canada). I always say, I honestly don't care if we do communism or capitalism just pick one and do it well.

The best run and most successful socialist country ever was East Germany.

Even by global standards (compared against all countries) it did fairly well. By socialist standards it did really well. By German standards, it did so much worse than Austria, Switzerland or West Germany.

I don't think you want that for Canada. And that's pretty much a best case outcome.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese

how to quantify "by and large"? there's not many chinese people outside china and most of them left china in the last 100 years in search of better lives.

and usa and singapore are rich?

USA and Singapore are stinking rich, yes.

> [...] there's not many chinese people outside china and most of them left china in the last 100 years in search of better lives.

Wikipedia says:

> Overseas Chinese people are people of Chinese origin who reside outside Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan).[20] As of 2011, there were over 40.3 million overseas Chinese.[8]

40.3 million is quite a few. And they form significant minorities in many South East Asian countries.

But you are right that eg Germany or South Sudon don't really have enough Chinese people to really say much about them there.