4 ms·

Manafacturing productivity is though the roof. PCBs are incredibly cheap now, and lead times are in days. Micros that can do almost anything, bristling with per

Manafacturing productivity is though the roof. PCBs are incredibly cheap now, and lead times are in days. Micros that can do almost anything, bristling with peripherals and programmable in C or even just running Linux, rather than hand assembly or discrete circuits. Dedicated devices that cost cents handle tasks that used to take organisations months and months to design. All sorts of materials make things that used to be impossible routine. Machine control of all sorts is mind-blowing in precision, reliability and speed. You can get things lasered, printed, sintered, cast, moulded, routed, milled, waterjetted, EDMed, whatever, at prices and turnarounds that would have been complete fantasy in the past.

ryukoposting 4y ago
I was thinking something similar (if narrower). In my universe (embedded systems), we have entire BLE stacks-in-a-box shipped to us by manufacturers now. That would have been inconceivable 20 years ago. Now more than ever, peripherals can be interconnected using a little bit-twiddling, automating a lot of the system logic that would have been handled explicitly in the past. To be fair, none of that matters if we aren't actually doing useful things with the fancy microcontrollers.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  We are doing useful things with them. The price of manufactured goods has plummeted, driven largely by automation and control. Maybe we don't really see that because first world cost of living has largely risen to match, driven mostly by housing and energy costs and healthcare. But in the less developed world, people can afford a lot more manufactured goods than they could 30 years ago. Which is at least partly because in absolute terms, those goods cost very little. Sure, a TV 30 years ago was still "just" a rectangular screen, but if you lived in rural Slovenia, you still probably couldn't afford one. Now, it's probably still expensive to you to get a basic flat panel TV, but it's not as wildly unaffordable as it was - adjusting for inflation, TVs are 10x cheaper today then 1985. And this doesn't only go for electronics, loads of things cost less and are more available. The only things that might not be are things like raw materials and energy where supply, demand and other factors keep prices high over time. For example aluminium was $0.60/lb in the 80s, now it's $1.40. This is actually a slight drop in price after inflation ($0.60 then is $1.61) but certainly not as cheap as you'd expect if the only factors were production efficiency. Of course a lot of micros do end up in complete junk. Which is sad for a lot of reasons, not only the environmental costs but also the wasted human effort of designing the disposable Bluetooth-enabled dog toothbrush in the first place.

ryukoposting 4y ago

I was thinking something similar (if narrower). In my universe (embedded systems), we have entire BLE stacks-in-a-box shipped to us by manufacturers now. That would have been inconceivable 20 years ago. Now more than ever, peripherals can be interconnected using a little bit-twiddling, automating a lot of the system logic that would have been handled explicitly in the past. To be fair, none of that matters if we aren't actually doing useful things with the fancy microcontrollers.

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
We are doing useful things with them. The price of manufactured goods has plummeted, driven largely by automation and control. Maybe we don't really see that because first world cost of living has largely risen to match, driven mostly by housing and energy costs and healthcare. But in the less developed world, people can afford a lot more manufactured goods than they could 30 years ago. Which is at least partly because in absolute terms, those goods cost very little. Sure, a TV 30 years ago was still "just" a rectangular screen, but if you lived in rural Slovenia, you still probably couldn't afford one. Now, it's probably still expensive to you to get a basic flat panel TV, but it's not as wildly unaffordable as it was - adjusting for inflation, TVs are 10x cheaper today then 1985. And this doesn't only go for electronics, loads of things cost less and are more available. The only things that might not be are things like raw materials and energy where supply, demand and other factors keep prices high over time. For example aluminium was $0.60/lb in the 80s, now it's $1.40. This is actually a slight drop in price after inflation ($0.60 then is $1.61) but certainly not as cheap as you'd expect if the only factors were production efficiency. Of course a lot of micros do end up in complete junk. Which is sad for a lot of reasons, not only the environmental costs but also the wasted human effort of designing the disposable Bluetooth-enabled dog toothbrush in the first place.