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This is actually surprisingly cheap. My guess is the real margin is in the tests itself, which you must buy from Roche as well.

Yes, and if you install one on site, they send dedicated techs to set it up, which lasts a month or more, plus custom integration with site software. I worked with a similar machine and if it lost its net connection to the backend database, it would dump half a million $ in reagents down the drain when it entered "safe mode".

That is amazingly cheap, I expected an order of magnitude more.

The video above (at least one of them) was showing an entire automation line built on Roche technology-- easily an order of magnitude more than 400k. The Cobas 8800 is just a component of that entire line.

Ah ok, that makes more sense. I figured a 100K or so per unit would be cheap the way it has been engineered. That's a whole robotic laboratory and what with the normal price of cleanroom equipment it would be ridiculously cheap if that setup was a few hundred K.