Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Here is a video [0] of him with it on, yeah, nothing like the Apple watch. Also on the topic of cheap Chinese watches I would read the section of this article on the smartwatch [1] and note this was published 2 years ago. That whole article is interesting but the smartwatch and their contact who said it only cost them $6 to make (note they bought the watches for just under $10 each):

> If the factory sold the watches for $7.49, how much could they possibly cost to make? That’s a question that can be awfully hard to get answered. Not really expecting an answer, we asked our friend to ask his friend. She was happy to tell us: $6.

> Six dollars for: a GSM chipset, a CPU, an LCD screen, a battery, a PCB, a metal housing, a molded silicone watch band, a MicroUSB cable, and a box. And the labor to assemble and test all of that.

[0] http://www.xxlmag.com/video/2018/12/soulja-boy-watch-brand-s...

[1] https://medium.com/newco/what-50-buys-you-at-huaqiangbei-the...

The insane part is, if you are an American company trying to release a smart watch, you won't be able to get your cost of goods down that low.

I worked on the Microsoft Band team, the RAM inside the Band cost almost the same as these watches cost to make all up!

Annoyingly enough, when we asked MediaTek if we could buy use their chipset, they would only sell it to us with their OS running on top. IIRC I think they were softening up on this stance later on.

Suffice to say after paying for a Western company's MCU + the RAM, the cost was already way above what these watches cost to make, add in all the other parts and, well, that is how you end up with a $200 MSRP.

On the flip side, things like a custom made light pipe to improve HR accuracy are necessary to go from "good enough" to "best in class".

> On the flip side, things like a custom made light pipe to improve HR accuracy are necessary to go from "good enough" to "best in class".

Totally agree/understand. I've had a little time messing with budget bin "smart watches" and they remind me a lot of the early versions of Android vs iOS where the hardware/software pairing in iOS was just such a better experience than a really cheap Android phone. The Android ticked all the same boxes on paper but typing or scrolling on both the device was a night and day difference. Note: I'm not trying to start an iOS vs Android fight, just pointing out that having the same basic capabilities (wifi, bluetooth, 3g, touch screen, etc) does not automatically put 2 products in the same category.

> Annoyingly enough, when we asked MediaTek if we could buy use their chipset, they would only sell it to us with their OS running on top.

I hit the same thing with Freescale too. I think it's that they don't want to deal with support calls for unsupported software.

It was surreal hearing their rep tell us that the chip was specifically designed for only FreeRTOS, Linux, & WinCE and physically could not run anything else. Like, we just want to run our in house RTOS; we're quite used to having to write our own BSP.

Reminds me of the $100 iphone x clone https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvmkdd/counterfei...

Notice how none of the product photos show the other side? Must be a pretty ugly micro b port.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com