Hacker News Reader

Comment by baldeagle | Hacker News Reader

$330 for a wifi eink display? The server seems pretty neat though. I imagine there is a lot more complexity there than it seems at first glance.

View on HN

I hack electronics as a hobby, and I'm am constantly amazed by the incredible prices of even the simplest screens. I can buy a Nexus 7 that includes a CPU, RAM, video card, SSD, wifi, a battery, and a 7" touchscreen for the same price I can buy a 5.6" non-touch screen at 720p [1]. And no, that doesn't include the battery or any of the tablet hardware. That's just the screen.

There's literally no reason why displays need to be as expensive as they are when a normal person wants to buy them, seeing as how Apple and Google et al have no problem sourcing them for much, much, MUCH less.

[1] http://www.adafruit.com/products/1666

Meanwhile, you could buy that Nexus 7 display for only $50 if you could figure out how to connect it to your project.

A Kindle Paperwhite's display is only $40, so their additional expenses are incredibly high.

http://www.powerbookmedic.com/Amazon-Kindle-Paperwhite-Displ...

It's unsubsidized by media sales, so the price doesn't seem outlandish at all.

None of the e-ink Kindles are sold at a loss. This product shouldn't cost much more than the comparable Kindle or Nook.

Not sure about that. Perhaps not sold at a loss in terms of bill of materials right now (since they have been in production for some time they probably brought the price down), but that doesn't account for the labor costs (developers, support, etc...).

All e-book readers are subsuidized by book sales. Amazon would be mad not to do it that way. They are a goods company not a hardware company.

If they wanted to give away a free kindle with every Prime subscription they could, but they're still selling them above manufacturing cost.

They are also manufactured in much much larger runs, thus bringing down their manufacturing price significantly.

When you phrase it like that it sounds really bad.

How about a ruggedized wifi eink display with a fully featured HTML5 application stack, long autonomy and awesome support.

Is that a better value proposition?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com