schlack

ivanh said:

We want a “durable” product. Not something “aged” in just a year.

Soli said:

pureluxlife said:

Sorry, but this is absolutely BS. Most of this hardware is dirt cheap to manufacture, and apple gets all there parts massively below any prices you would ever see published because apple is one of the largest customers on the market and orders in major bulk. 216 is about the same it costs them to build an iphone, and theres no way youre concing me a crappy home pod gimmick product cost in the same ballpark and a full fledged handheld Computer(iphone). 

I don't think anyone is going to argue with you about the stated component prices, but to suggest that Apple uses "hardware [that] is dirt cheap to manufacture" is absolutely false. Apple has repeatedly shown that they go out of their way to use better components than the competition, even if many believe that they're the exact same based on some superficial spec sheet listing. Years ago AnandTech even speculated that Apple had a deal to source the most power efficient chips for their Macs despite the model numbers being identical. This is because not all chips are exactly the same, and I have to assume Apple was paying a premium for that benefit or had some other arrangement that would benefit Intel.

You can find a cheap 4" woofer online, but that one component is made up of many components that Apple probably sourced or even designed for a vendor to build so that it would offer the right kind of sound. This means it's likely not an off the shelf component which means they likely paid more for it than some run-of the-milll 4" speaker, despite economies of scale potential being in effect for even this new product category.

Then you have many other materials as well as material that make up components Apple sources from vendors where they will demand that the workers are paid fairly for the region, not overworked, and aren't made with harmful chemicals that are bad fo the environment. You may find these to be pointless considerations, but Apple has webpages detailing just how important these aspects are to the company. You could even argue that it's all for publicity, but that's a moot point, as it is part of their ethos and then efforts do end up costing them money.

Finally, Apple has massive mindshare. This means they can easily sell a lot more products with little advertising compared to an unknown startup, but it also means that they're scrutinized a lot more, which means R&D costs may have to be increased so that they can test for unknowns which will raise costs, as well factor in potential legal issues for the truly unknowns which also get added to the product costs before any profit margin can be attributed.