Comment by charleszyong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by charleszyong | Hacker News Reader

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Design for manufacturing is one thing. I did it a lot when building micro gas turbines in college. Sometimes changing the design or manufacturing process will make it 10x faster to make one while not compromising the performance.

The second thing is low margin. When people are pricing hardware, they usually plan a 50% to 100% margin to offset various costs that happen in the real world. From what I've heard, in extreme cases, some products cost around $100 while they are being sold at close to $1000. I believe in the Prusa printer approach: you design a good product and price it a little bit above cost. So the company grows with the community.

Deep down, there are so many times that I wish I could afford a fancy tool like a Milwaukee drill or a Mitutoyo caliper. And in extreme cases, I really wish I could have a HAAS UMC-400 or even a KERN Micro HD+. Now that I can set the price, I really wish I could make someone get what they want without breaking their bank.

For folks curious about why these kinds of margins are built in for hardware products, I found these videos informative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwrkfHadeQQ

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IdAT_SIRK8c&pp=QAFIAQ%3D%3D

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=63pnz-z_2sU&pp=QAFIAQ%3D%3D

As a customer, thin margins scare the crap out of me. It means you probably won’t be around in a few years.

Seems like this stuff is mostly built on open source, so no need to be too scared.

that's more scary, not less! Sure, if the worst happens, since it's open source, we'll have the source, but being open source means they've got to figure out a more complicated business model than make thing, sell thing, profit. there are some success stories but also a lot of failures.

I guess I should clarify that it's open source, and seems to be essentially forked from HuggingFace's SO-101, so it's probably not too hard to fall back to that stuff (with fewer features).

That’s not at all reassuring to someone who wants the benefit of the product, not the obligation to become an expert on the product.

I’ll buy one of these for sure, but I would cheerfully spend 3x the price if it meant being sure of support and repair and software updates for a few years.

I have bins full of exciting devices that no longer integrate, many of which have open source communities, which I just don’t have the time to deal with.

This is based on the open-source HuggingFace/LeRobot SO-101, so it'll probably be possible to fall back to that. Or you can just get an SO-101. But I think this is attempting to draft on that ecosystem, and this is cheaper than Alibaba parts to build an SO-101.

It’s worth reading the history behind Raspberry Pi. It depends on the team. With the right product market for, this strategy has and will work. In my view, the Vassar team got the pricing strategy right to do something even bigger than Raspberry Pi if they can scale at this price point for the low end model.

For software support, the software is open source, so the community can keep it going even if we’re no longer around (hopefully not anytime soon).

For repairs, the components are inexpensive enough to simply swap in a new one, and you can always find replacements on AliExpress.

that's really great, thanks for sharing!

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