If you didn't have billions of people around the world buying them, the technology in your typical smartphone would cost many many thousands of dollars. Big mar

If you didn't have billions of people around the world buying them, the technology in your typical smartphone would cost many many thousands of dollars. Big markets with big demand can drive down cost curves almost unimaginably. It starts making sense to hire smart people to look at every aspect of how the thing works and is made, and to invest huge amounts of capital into equipment that can only be justified when the number of units is in the tens of millions. Something as niche as oversized passive e-ink screens will never attract that capital or expertise, since it could never recoup those costs. Eventually someone will either improve the technology enough for it to have a large end market (changing wallpaper in the home?) or it will stay niche until the patents run out and the tech can find more applications that currently don't make sense because the licensing fees would be too high.