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Comment by atwrk | Hacker News Reader

The comments here seem to show a typical US-EU divide in perspectives, people talk past each other. Yes, mass-market low-margin consumer products (the US view) probably won't be produced much in the EU in the next few years.

But much of the electronics industry in the EU is B2B and centers around producing high-margin products where 10.000 units of a product would be huge.

The company I work for, for example, usually produces a few hundred units of a product before the next revision replaces it. Whether or not the PCB costs 20€ more or not really isn't that important if you only plan to sell 100 devices of it per year for 10k€ each. Aspects like quality and regulatory conformity are way more important here.

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That is an excellent point. The development costs of such low-volume projects are often way higher than the production costs. Having production in house or close often allows tighter, thus faster, prototyping and feedback during development, which in turn saves money.

The whole "But how can this be scaled and monetized" crowd here also does not seem to understand the point of such projects and Germany's Hacker community. It is about learning and just doing it, much less about building a high–revenue business.

I think so too, because the bar to economic sustainability is not incredibly high. I know a lot of one-man businesses operating with one Siplace pick and place machine and making a good living out of it.

Many people don't have the desire to expand forever. In my case I hope the company grows o 20 or 30 employees, and then I would work stabilizing it so it can last 50+ years. e.g. setting up a trust to oversee the well being of employees, the quality of the products, etc.

This is completely alien to most american founders and businessmen, in the words of Larry Elison: "it's not enough for me to win, it's about everybody else losing"

Hey, talk speaker here, that's a great point!

A discussion that got cut from the talk at the early draft process was defining what "small-series" and "large-series" mean.

To me, at a human scale and without dystopian monopolies, a small series is anything under 1k, a medium series around 50k and a large series 100-500k.

I wanted to define a special class of series, because to an american a small series is probably more like 100k, and a large one 1 million or more, last year something like 230 million iphones were sold globally and that's an absurd number imo.

Because my vision of a healthy electronics industry is 200 companies each selling competing runs of 1 million units, rather than apple selling all 230 million.

In my ideal world then, the only way for apps to be distributed is a marketplace that is regulated and prevents apple from imposing their 30% tax on every dollar spent on the app store.

How would this marketplace be regulated? Is the idea that there would be an open app format (so that devices from different vendors could run these apps) or a regulated OS?

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