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Slight tangent here, but SV tech often gets criticized for building shit that people don't need (Juicero is a good recent example, but people said it about the
by pbiggar 9y ago
Slight tangent here, but SV tech often gets criticized for building shit that people don't need (Juicero is a good recent example, but people said it about the iphone when it came out).
The upside of all that ridiculous tech for 22 year old dudes with too much money, is that it brings down the cost to manufacture valuable stuff like this, start hardware startups with good causes, etc. I know this is in a research lab, but there was a similar sonar-for-deaf-people one recently.
- icebraining 9y agoI find it hard to believe that a few nonsensical hardware startups are responsible for lowering prices. The production sizes are just too small to have an effect on China's massive output.
- pbiggar 9y agoWell, the iphone... But the "cost" I'm referring to isn't just money. It's the amount of people who have done it, the expertise that's out there, the incubators, the support networks, the people willing to invest in hardware, etc, etc, etc.
- PeterisP 9y agoThat's kind of the whole point - the big manufacturers affect only the upstream providers of various scaling technology, tools, components and manufacturing systems suitable for mass production of very large batches; but the startup&maker ecosystem creates a market for a different kind of tools, vendors and components - ones that are useful for prototyping and building cost efficient small batch products.