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I’d love to know how it can so cheap to make and still be profitable? What environmental / labor horrors need to occur?
by azinman2 6y ago
I’d love to know how it can so cheap to make and still be profitable? What environmental / labor horrors need to occur?
- vagrantJin 6y agoPerhaps it was never expensive to build. Perhaps there is little to no labour.
- nfriedly 6y agoIt looks like they mostly drove the price down by reducing functionality. There are no "fancy" interfaces like UART or i2c. There's only 64 bytes of RAM. The chips are one-time programmable which is cheaper than flash memory, and there's only 512 bytes of program space. The CPU is pretty limited too - it doesn't even have an instruction to multiply two numbers. There's no debugging interface on the chip, instead you buy a simulator device that behaves like the chip, but has reprogrammable memory and a debugging interface. It all adds up, or in this case it doesn't, and what's left is a pretty inexpensive chip.