> They made a big, high-tech factory with a large degree of automation. That's a great way to build a high volume product. It's a terrible way to build a $3000

> They made a big, high-tech factory with a large degree of automation. That's a great way to build a high volume product. It's a terrible way to build a $3000 niche computer. The hidden cost of high wages: automation induced product inflexibility. It's not even limited to low-volume products: if you had 100x the demand and the production capacity to match, you'd still want to run your expensive automation pipeline mostly unchanged for almost as many years as with a low-volume product. Only some of the up-front cost of automation is fixed per product change, another part is fixed per throughput * product change and this part will hit you at 100/day as hard as at 10000/day.