Re: Amiga, Mac, Atari

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Wildstar replied:

<snip>
> The question maybe
>a at most a little cheaper
>and yes at 100,000 unit shipment, well you are talking about an overall
>price difference. Still doesn't make a d*** difference on the per unit price
>of the console which is only a $99 unit. Just sell it for $99.99 a piece.
>which is $100 and gain that $1.00 addition in price.

No, the price point is _absolutely fixed_--what changes is the profit.

> Tighten the trace
>circuits a slight further. (Bring the chips slightly closer) makes the PCB
>smaller.

...requiring either a better (more expensive) board fabrication process
or pushing the limits of the cheaper process...and there goes the reject
rate again--more wasted boards and more wasted money.

Everything in engineering is a tradeoff, and mass produced devices
are run as close to optimum as possible.  When planning a production
run of hundreds of thousands, you can go to a supplier--or even to
several suppliers--and get chips and packages customized to save
pennies.  And this is the correct engineering choice.

Take a look inside some consumer electronics and you will see
cost reductions made after the board version was frozen--places
where C235 would have gone, but was found to be unnecessary,
for example.  That cap costs a penny in production quantities, and
installing it costs half that, and the one board in 100,000 that has
to be scrapped because C235 was bad is another 0.1 cent.  But
that's 1.6 cents more profit per unit, which is $1600 per hundred
thousand.  And it only cost $250 to implement the production
change order to delete inserting C235 when it was found that the
device would function well without it.

In the next rev of the board, C235 will have disappeared completly,
provided there were enough other improvements and a good 
enough market to justify making the next revision...

-michael

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