On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 10:03:47AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot via devel wrote:
The marginal cost of a button is completely marginal, on devices
that
already include other buttons, on a assembly line that already builds a
ton of such things.
Marginal costs are still costs. They add up _very_ quickly.
If they can save $0.01 by eliminating a physical button, over a
million-unit production run that's a cool $1 million of potantial
profit. Believe me, if they project that the NRE required to realize
that cost savings comes in under $1M, they will make it happen.
(Obviously the production volume is what determines what level of cost
optimzation is worthwhile...)
A physical button is a on-of, a digital key infrastructure is years
of
expensive maintenance and updates to keep going.
The marginal cost of additional users of digital key infrastructure is
infitesimal, especially if the widget already requires some sort of
online service to function. The costs of that get covered by the
subscrption fees. (and when there's no fee, the costs get covered by
mining your data)
Now the manufacturer may run the numbers and decide that using a
physical button vs pure digital implementation reduces the _support_
costs, so it's better to stick with a button, but if we're being honest
here most of the time post-sales lifecycle implications are rarely given
any consideration at all.
- Solomon
--
Solomon Peachy pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
@pizza:shaftnet dot org (matrix)
High Springs, FL speachy (freenode)