The acquisition cost of a soft tooler is presumably sizably higher than the cost of maintaining antiquated production equipment. It's likely that the per-item t

The acquisition cost of a soft tooler is presumably sizably higher than the cost of maintaining antiquated production equipment. It's likely that the per-item throughput cost of a programmable tooler is sizably higher than that for a single-function device. Before even asking about investment, you should check to see that the math actually makes it profitable to have a soft-configurable factory doing short-production runs. If you do, I think you'll find your answer about why this sort of thing doesn't exist yet (although it does, in China!)