Re:The Hardware Renaissance
by tomkinstinch on Tuesday October 23, 2012 @07:51PM
(#4690948)
Indeed, looking at capital costs for our product the injection mold tooling is one of the most expensive aspects of production. Rapid prototyping (CNC milling/laser cutting/3D printing/etc.) reduces the cost of iterative development, but there's no way around what it costs to ramp up for production.
Recession hits these companies hard, because of the costs of stock; labour; etc, and because volatility of customers makes long term planning tricky.
And, really, the components that are common over many projects are cheap. It's the stuff that's specific to a build that is expensive. The PCB, the case and tooling for the case, the connector (sometimes), these are the big costs.