Comment by quantumwannabe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quantumwannabe | Hacker News Reader

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This appears to be a rebranding (at nearly three times the price) of the Gakken Record Maker (which is still available online for its MSRP of ¥7,980 ($55) [1]). It even comes with a copy of the Gakken magazine! Here's a review of the Gakken record maker (which looks identical to the Teenage Engineering one) [2], the Japanese description from Gakken [3], and an English description from a reseller [4].

Gakken is a Japanese educational company. One of their products is a magazine called "Otona no Kagaku" (Adult Science) which comes with a kit to build a toy version of a mechanical or electronic device. Because they're part of a magazine, the kits are only available for a limited time. Here's some examples of the other issues' kits [5]. Some of the more notable ones are a wax cylinder recorder [6] and a gramophone kit [7].

[1] https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/NEOBK-2453544 https://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/4057507221/gkp_shu... https://hon.gakken.jp/book/1575072200

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB8qtW19nf4

[3] https://otonanokagaku.net/magazine/vol46/index.html

[4] https://www.turntablelab.com/products/gakken-easy-record-mak...

[5] https://otonanokagaku.net/ https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/series/2993 https://www.adafruit.com/category/269

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9X2CS4cs8o

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDdZFFLnsUo

The margins on everything Teenage Engineering sells must be insane. Thinking in particular of their "computer-1" itx case which is a handful of pieces of unbent sheet metal and commodity parts, all for a mere *$195*.

The photo of the record factory on that landing page weighs in at 9.84MB -- the margin probably goes towards AWS bandwidth costs!

For comparison:

War and Peace is only 3.2 MB, or 3.9 MB with the overhead of HTML

source: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600

Yeah but the manga version is 6.6GB

Okay, now I'm curious, link to the manga version?

This manga is part of the variety art works series which transcribes (transdraws?) important literary works for younger japanese who might not have the understanding yet to read them in their orig. translation.

You can find a list of series here: https://myanimelist.net/people/21441/Variety_Art_Works

Edit: This is the same series that includes mein kampf and capital, both which have had many panels screenshotted you can find around the net circulating (f.e. if you'we ever met a mangaised Marx, or some weird collection of nazi's illustrated they are quite common tropes)

I just made that up for the joke

How does a professional web designer even put up a picture that large without going through some basic compression?

I've personally experienced this at work before.

A non-technical person uploaded the image to the CMS, assuming it will be scaled down at some point after uploading. A web developer used the image from the CMS, assuming it was scaled down at some point before being exposed for the frontend to access it. In reality the image never got scaled down anywhere, and ended up on the frontend in its full 9 MB glory. This ended up happening with several images.

I (not a frontend dev) ended up finding it because I was writing a strongly-worded message to my team lead about the huge pile of unnecessary tracking/surveillance scripts being forced on frontend users, and I wanted to make the point that it was making the frontend slow and heavy. It turned out out that the tracking scripts were nothing compared to the huge images!

Apparently nobody else bothered to check this before me, and/or didn't stop for half a second to think about it when they saw "Total page size: 13 MB" in their browser devtools, and/or didn't actually attempt to do any investigation when they saw our shitty Lighthouse rating. The world is full of professionals in name and status, but not in attitude.

I am a one man shop running a news site and put my site through webpagetest every Monday morning. I find it crazy that big companies apparently don’t do this.

You're likely more dedicated than most. There is a certain level of ignorance that allows these people to continue in comfort and unfortunately its not fixable because they don't know and likely don't care.

I am generally surprised when a web developer produces anything at all without 200 separate requests on every pageload and a 20M+ footprint.

Which in turn, the margin AWS has on the bandwidth they sell must be insane! People seem to pay for "premium" bandwidth and not even batting an eye, people just swallow that stuff right up. Just like TE, it must make them a ton of money.

Yeah, seems like it would be rather straightforward to send a template design to an online fabrication company. CNC seems like it would be overkill but I assume they are willing to cut sheet metal.

That could be a fun assignment for a design course. Lots of technical details to consider, such as dimensions of standard components, but a lot of design freedom as well.

A CNC laser would be the best bet. A good one could cut this in about 5 min. Water jets and CNC plasma cutters could do it, but they would probably both have issues with that many pierces.

I agree though - $195 for this is a bit much:

https://images.prismic.io/teenageengineering/d379b4fd-3721-4...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGpKAIsUIpI

It looks like it has countersunk screw holes, so that would usually be done on a CNC punch: http://www.vandf.co.uk/tooling/what-is-cnc-punching/ (amazing machines) It also looks powder-coated... when you consider their likely volumes $195 is not unreasonable once you take into account development costs, setup costs and overheads.

Not discounting the coolness of CNC punching whatsoever, but the reasonableness of $195 is way off, even if they are manufacturing in low volumes domestically.

Parts like this should ideally be manufactured via stamping, which would also produce any countersinks needed. Even better would be to have them cut and bent in a progressive die (also a super cool manufacturing process!) and would have all cuts and features done in one go. But if I were them, I'd probably aim for a buck or two for each sheet part, maybe up to five dollars if you wanted to keep it at a local shop with low volumes. But the big win of having just flat pieces is you can make a ton of components at once and they can take up very little space on a shelf. Get a few thousand produced and powdercoated, and then just keep an eye on when supply runs low.

Basically, if they aren't making 90% margin on these (all in, shipped to your door) I'd be disappointed.

Totally agree, they're getting these for a few bucks a part,maybe 10 bucks total for the kit. If they're paying any more they should not be.

The power of decent product with massive hipster appeal

I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like 400%+ on everything but maybe the pocket operators. Even those probably have healthy margin, as it is just PCB + some buttons. custom LCDs in tens of thousands are also insanely cheap (in ballpark of $1 for something like that).

> Yuri Suzuki has joined forces with cult electronics studio Teenage Engineering and Japanese educational toymaker Gakken to launch the PO-80 Record Factory.

https://www.pentagram.com/news/po-80-record-factory

Also, from the submission URL, second paragraph:

> PO-80 record factory is a compact and portable record cutter, made in collaboration with yuri suzuki.

> They've also made a wax cylinder recorder

Jan Derogee will be ecstatic to hear that in case he loses his reproducer again.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNFQkcbY5cQ

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