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Kindle 2 Tear-Down Reveals Price of Components
adeelarshad82 writes "Amazon's wildly popular Kindle 2 got a good old fashioned tear-down from the folks at market research firm iSuppli. According to the organization, the Kindle 2's manufacturing cost is almost half as much as its retail price."
Back in the days of the C64 'me and the gang' looked at the cost of duplicating a commercial ROM cartridge copier plug-in board (for our own use - not to re-sell). I could do the the electronics, someone had the PCB making kit etc.. but when we added up all the raw costs, we were disappointed to find out it was cheaper to buy the item off the shelf!
AT&ROFLMAO
This reminds me of a story from a WSJ article from 1974, about the nationalization of plants in Chile, quote in Ayn Rand's Philosophy: Who Needs It:
Among them was Dow Chemical Company, which owned a plastics plant in Chile. Bob G. Caldwell, Dow's director of operations for South America, came with a technical team to inspect the remains of their plant. "'What we found was unbelievable to us,' he recalls, 'The plant was still operable, but in another six months we wouldn't have had a plant at all. They never checked anything.' ....Worse yet, the highly inflammable chemicals handled at the plant were in imminent danger of blowing up. 'Safety went to pot,' Mr. Caldwell says. 'The fire-sprinkler system was disconnected and the valves taken away for some other use outside. Then they were smoking in the most dangerous areas. They told us, "You didn't have any fires while you were here before, so it must not be as dangerous as you said."'"