I guess the truth is a mixture of "larger willingness to cut corners" and "aiming for a lower margin". That's not a bad thing. It's just that in a market as transparent and competitive as this, it's really hard to be better along every single dimension.
This means for example :
- one integrated network switch/router for 18 servers; no need to buy an external cisco/juniper/whatever
- one dual power supply for the whole gang instead of 19 (18 servers + switch)
- less metal/plastic parts
We try to reuse hardware designs and software from one iteration to another when possible.
In short, we do have less "unneeded components". Equivalent designs (thinking at moonshot for example) are expensive, so to achieve same density it's more expensive to buy existing solutions than what we design & build.