>> If metal and plastic are "cheap", then why does everything get made
>> out of the most skimpy amounts of material the manufacturers can get
>> away with so that it's only just barely strong enough to not break?
>
> Why waste money making it stronger and thicker than it reasonably needs
> to be? Even just 5 or 10 cents extra spent on each iPhone would equal
> quite a big amount of money overall.

Making something stronger than it needs to be would indeed be a waste of 
money. But it seems that these days, everything is made *weaker* than it 
actually should be.

Then again, maybe that's because I'm still thinking like a consumer. 
When I buy something, I want it to *not* brake. The manufacturer, on the 
other hand, has a vested interest in making it so flimsy that it won't 
last 5 minutes. That way they get more repeat business. (In addition to 
the materials savings, obviously.)

Personally it makes me angry that somebody would deliberately design 
something to be defective so that they can make more money out of me. 
But I guess we can put that down to market forces. There will always be 
people who make expensive high-quality goods, and other people who make 
cheap low-quality goods. What kinds of product you find in the shops 
depends on what people buy the most of. And today's mentality seems to 
be "buy the cheapest thing on the shelf, no matter how defective it is".

>> Now, see, I would have thought just surface-mounting the 2,157
>> individual resistors would cost more than $10... But what do I know
>> about anything?
>
> I suspect the cost of mounting the resistors can be worked out by the
> depreciation of the SMD mounting machines over the lifetime of the
> product, plus the cost of running the machine.

How about the cost of the resistors themselves?

Oh, mind you, that's already in the BoM...

> It's surely not very much
> though, given that you can buy loads of consumer devices with populated
> PCBs inside them for well under $10.

True. I have a 4GB flash RAM device in my pocket that cost 99p.

(I still don't understand why digital devices *need* thousands of 
analogue components in them in the first place, but anyway...)

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