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The BOM isn't likely the driving factor in the price, but rather the small number (relatively speaking) of units they'll sell. They have to amortize the cost o
by blihp 8y ago
The BOM isn't likely the driving factor in the price, but rather the small number (relatively speaking) of units they'll sell. They have to amortize the cost of all the design and engineering over however many units they end up selling which is probably going to dominate the costs. Not just the labor for the finished product but every blind alley they've gone down, every failed prototype board etc. Then they have to mark the whole thing up (i.e. profit margin) to make it all worthwhile and allow them to do version 2. Version 2 or 3 is probably when they can start thinking about driving down costs.
- Vinnl 8y agoFor some interesting insight in this, Fairphone has published the cost breakdown of their phone [1]. It's quite a bit more expensive than similar phones, but only about €5 of that is justified by the "fair" part of the phone - most of it is just source materials being more expensive due to their small scale. [1] https://www.fairphone.com/en/2015/09/09/cost-breakdown-of-the-fairphone-2/ https://www.fairphone.com/en/2015/09/09/cost-breakdown-of-th...
- blihp 8y agoThanks for posting this and it is quite informative re: BOM pricing. I suspect that Librem is having to do quite a bit more work on the software side than the Fairphone as their development costs appear pretty minuscule. Even so, based on this breakdown it's probably not as big a piece of the final price as I had guesstimated.