5 ms·

If only the executives' salaries were scrutinized this closely. If someone is telling you about sacrificing safety to save a lone cent they are insane or hopele

If only the executives' salaries were scrutinized this closely. If someone is telling you about sacrificing safety to save a lone cent they are insane or hopelessly inept at their job. On almost any profit margin imaginable. Sell a million of these for $88 and you have saved only $10,000 on $88 million in sales. I don't know the Kindle profit margin but I'm going to guess it is quite a bit. One court case about the charger catching fire would eat that $10,000.

vlovich123 6y ago
Charger blocks are not $88 retail let alone BOM. 1 cent in BOM translates to 5-7c in MSRP if I recall correctly. The charger itself is probably a dollar or two so you’re looking at 2-5% of the total charger cost. Maybe not a talent thing on the part of the engineer (although could be contributory) so much as getting pressure from management to cut BOM across the board without management specifying any kind of threshold requirement. Obviously still ridiculous when talking about charger safety but it’s important to remember we only see one side of the story here. Who knows what actually happened. I’ve worked with talented EE engineers on the client side complaining about how the contractor fucked up a board layout, wired things up incorrectly, or swapped out for cheaper “equivalent” parts that were out of spec in some incorrect way.
- baybal2 6y ago
  Chargers used to be way more expensive, proprietary ones in particular. Branded siemens, and ericsson chargers for phones were $100+ circa 2001
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    That's true but you have to look at shipped volume & BOM cost (bill of materials), not MSRP from a charging block 20 years ago. If this charging block was from the Kindle, you're looking at significantly higher volume & several years of advances that drive the cost down. Additionally, since everyone has shifted to stock USB chargers, all chargers have gotten drastically cheaper due to scaling. You can buy a wall USB (C or A) charger for a few $ MSRP which means it costs like 20-50 cents for the components that go into it.

vlovich123 6y ago

Charger blocks are not $88 retail let alone BOM. 1 cent in BOM translates to 5-7c in MSRP if I recall correctly. The charger itself is probably a dollar or two so you’re looking at 2-5% of the total charger cost. Maybe not a talent thing on the part of the engineer (although could be contributory) so much as getting pressure from management to cut BOM across the board without management specifying any kind of threshold requirement. Obviously still ridiculous when talking about charger safety but it’s important to remember we only see one side of the story here. Who knows what actually happened. I’ve worked with talented EE engineers on the client side complaining about how the contractor fucked up a board layout, wired things up incorrectly, or swapped out for cheaper “equivalent” parts that were out of spec in some incorrect way.

baybal2 6y ago
Chargers used to be way more expensive, proprietary ones in particular. Branded siemens, and ericsson chargers for phones were $100+ circa 2001
- vlovich123 6y ago
  That's true but you have to look at shipped volume & BOM cost (bill of materials), not MSRP from a charging block 20 years ago. If this charging block was from the Kindle, you're looking at significantly higher volume & several years of advances that drive the cost down. Additionally, since everyone has shifted to stock USB chargers, all chargers have gotten drastically cheaper due to scaling. You can buy a wall USB (C or A) charger for a few $ MSRP which means it costs like 20-50 cents for the components that go into it.