rcomeau

jimh2 said:

Nothing makes those who need medical care happier to see Apple and other companies pushing into the medical hardware companies territory. They are going to start feeling the pain of having sat on their hands, enjoyed insane margins, and been slow to innovate thinking there is no competition.

When prices drop accessibility increases.

You might want to look into how much more complex and challenging it is to actually make a medical device. The regulatory burden is very heavy and debatable how much of it actually increases safety as many of the rules are knee jerk reactions to individual past failures rather than a holistic look at how to improve safety and quality efficiently. It is very difficult for a startup to be innovative with so much regulatory weight compared to consumer level stuff. We make a device and over 20% of the build cost is essentially for regulatory compliance expenses (not counting how much more R&D costs to do it in a medical device quality management environment). May not always be the case, but being innovative in this space rather than just keep making the same thing for years is expensive.