It's amazing that humanity can produce this sort of hardware under $1. This has implications that are more profound than previous industrial revolutions.
In centuries from now, our time will be studied as a remarkably revolutionary one.
In centuries from now, our time will be studied as a remarkably revolutionary one.
In a worst case scenario, the resources for this $1 microcontroller were mined by an african child, barely earning anything. These resources are then shipped to China(probably), where people along the way don't earn much either. Except the white collar workers managing it all, of course.
These controllers are then built in a factory, either by robots, or low-earning workers. Then shipped to a warehouse.
For me, the fact that such things can be bought so cheaply is not really an achievement if we look at how broken the supply chains are if we consider the humans who are affected by them. And also the environment which gets destroyed quite a bit.
I am of course talking from a moralist and empathical perspective. What I am trying to say is, that this is only an achievement because we accept or ignore the drastic consequences.
Speaking from a business and engineering perspective, I'd be surprised if (even in an ideal world with no environmental externalities or exploited third-world labourers) the cost of the raw resources, shipping and e-waste processing were a significant part of that $1.
We're literally talking about something 1/16 the size of a postage stamp that gets stamped into a similarly tiny plastic shell.
From my admittedly "peak mount stupid"[1] position as an engineer that uses these things, I'd suspect that the biggest contributors to that $1 figure come from the expert labour required to both R&D the chips as well as run the machines that manufacture them.
[1] http://theengineeringmanager.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/...
Of course...everything we do today is based on exploitation: 1000s of years of exploitation of humans, frequently the worker and poorer classes' labor, 100s of years, and billions dead in war...all our achievements today literally stand atop this ginormous pile of blood and death...but, that ever-present historical reality aside...I think a large proportion of the skyrocketing perf and ocean-depth-plumbing prices of components is due to the compounding and intersecting effects of all our technological efficiencies.
Anyway, we could solve these problems if we doubled the price. And then it would still be an amazing achievement.
Cheapest micros hovered around 10 cents mark before the semiconductor crisis.
Some Padauk micros go for single cents.