>>>not something that a lot of people in the tech space have spent their lives tinkering with in the way that they have with computers. Its one of those 'truth

>>>not something that a lot of people in the tech space have spent their lives tinkering with in the way that they have with computers. Its one of those 'truths' that are so true that people just don't want to deal with it: you can upgrade your software within seconds, but it takes - at least - a few minutes (if you're lucky) to upgrade your hardware. I've also worked for hardware companies, over the years. Hardware is hard because you're pushing atoms around. Not electrons. The difference between the particles is reflected in the difference between the kinds of engineers: you can express, in words, mere electrons - in seconds. But it takes a lot longer to make that same expression in hardware. >>>We shot ourselves in the foot by paying for tooling for castings before we'd validated it beyond 3d prints. We need better tools, and this is pretty clear to the hardware engineers who are trying to bring the design and production of hardware products to the same level of software. Imagine if, one day, we can build new hardware near-as-rapidly-as new software. In many ways (e.g. OpenSCAD: http://openscad.org http://openscad.org) we could compile hardware components as simply as we can software. When the gap is closed, we will have a new class of society: simply, wizards.