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Comment by jkestner | Hacker News Reader

Packaging is best thought of as another hardware product itself. Form and function have to be design-gineered, and materials and parts and assembly have to be corralled into a schedule and budget.

The idea that software is eating hardware, while true on some level for some class of products, is also what leads to lots of startups with solid software backgrounds offering a beautifully designed product that suffers from cost overruns, delays, mechanical and firmware bugs (you think having to test an app across a couple of phones is a pain, try field testing your smart lock). "Move fast and break things" is very different from the mindset needed to build hardware.

Be mindful of the perspective of the authors when reading these tragedies: https://medium.com/@stevekreyos/the-rise-and-fall-of-kreyos-... https://medium.com/@Haje/how-a-half-million-dollar-kickstart...

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That TriggerTrap thing is a lesson in poor project management. They outsourced all their technical work to agencies with basically no oversight and with no strong technical knowledge in house! Kreyos seems to have been in a similar situation.

I think really the lesson here is that you really, really, really shouldn't try to build an electronics or software product without in-house knowledge of electronics and software.

Right, I didn't mention such things as thermal and environmental testing. How is your widget going to work in an Icelandic winter or at the peak of summer in Death Valley? How about dirt, grime, dust, vibration and humidity, rapid cycling, cycles per day, drop, impact?

The list is huge and highly dependent on the product being designed.

About ten years ago a company owned by a friend of mine shipped a machine worth $800,000 to Japan. The packaging/crate was not designed correctly. The machine suffered irreparable damage during transportation. No, there was no penetration of the crate. It was purely inertial loads on components that were not supported for transportation. They bent. It was probably a combination of forklifts, trucking, port container handling, etc. The machine was a total loss. The insurance company was not happy.

Also: EMC testing, RFI, etc. Certified by a test lab that will cover both North America and Europe.

On shipping: these days it's pretty common to ship everything with mechanical accelerometers in the packaging that trigger on high loads so you can tell when the crate has been dropped. Crazy how often it happens.

Packaging is hard. I'd like to additionally nominate cables (as in wire harnesses) and strain reliefs to the list of things that make my life miserable.

Oh, yeah - hardware wears down over time in ways that software doesn't. Closest thing might be having to support new OSes, but that's not the same as failure when doing the exact same thing you always do in the same configuration.

Which leads to increased replacement costs. Other fun costs to account for in the physical world: loss rate in transit, defect rate in manufacturing, inventory costs.

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