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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Hardware usually first reduces in price because manufacturers start with a need to quickly recover the large R&D costs using a high profit margin, and at some point they break even and can start bringing the price down. And often manufacturing just does get cheaper as time goes on too. Game consoles are kinda special, as they are often sold at a loss from the start because they expect sales in games to eventuslly cover it all, so their pricing usually slowly trends down in hopes it attracts new owners that will then buy a bunch of games.

    Valve doesn’t do that with the Deck (they want the hardware division to be entirely self-sufficient), but they also set the margim to be really low right from the start to be competitive, so they had to increase the price to match current manufacturing costs or each Deck would lose the hardware division a lot of money.












  • My grandfather managed to install win 11 without meaning to, and the result was kinda “all your things are exactly where you left them, except we just remodeled the entire house, changed all the appliances, removed half the doors, replaced some with windows, and installed an unusable pool in the bathroom. Oh and the fridge is in the bedroom behind the living room couch.”

    Trying to explain why everything is different over the phone was real fun.






  • is it so much more expensive than manufacturing a HMD 2660, which does more or less the same things and retails for approx. $100?

    Yes, extremely so.

    HMD will manufacture millions of them with partners they have been using for a decade, they will each skim a few dollars to cover costs and profit and still do fine.
    Commodore will manufacture a fraction of that volume using parts way more expensive as they buy less of them, and they still have to cover r&d and tooling costs from that lower volume.

    That is why kickstarters (and pre-orders) are so damn useful, as that allows you to get a start at covering those costs before you even manufacture anything.