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*.
War and Peace is only 3.2 MB, or 3.9 MB with the overhead of HTML
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)
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.
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.
I agree though - $195 for this is a bit much:
https://images.prismic.io/teenageengineering/d379b4fd-3721-4...
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.
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).