Comment by tuatoru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuatoru | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, the article isn't great, talking about hazardous substances and such.

Phones are moving to "chip scale" components: resistors, inductors, capacitors less than 0.25mm in size. And the chips themselves are getting smaller and smaller. The quantity of "hazardous" stuff outside of the battery is plummeting.

Making the battery removable and replaceable and having fully-reticulated battery collection networks would be nice.

On cost, though: there is the concept of "embodied energy". The AirPods cost $250 while the peanut butter jar costs less than $1, in part because a lot of energy is used to make the small components in the AirPods. (Not corresponding to the price difference, of course, but more energy.) Lots more steps in the production chain of AirPods, each with their own energy losses.

So buying new AirPods does have a bigger environmental impact than buying a peanut butter jar.

> you throw away more plastic after a family-sized Chinese takeout meal.

Flying from one side of the country to the other and back uses more carbon than several years' worth of Chinese takeout containers.

Would be interesting to have a breakdown of why the AirPods cost so much. I suspect a large chunk of it is research and development. As well as the wages of the top talent in the world required to develop and manufacture them.

A jar is a mostly once off cost, you build the jar making machine and it works until it breaks. While AirPods are under constant innovation. So the initial cost has to be repaid fast.

Also because we’ll pay that much :)

Manufacture cost is estimated to be roughly $30. Retail price of no-name, little-margin AirPods knockoffs corroborate this.

I wouldn’t know where to begin with research and engineering, since all their products benefit from audio research and testing, iCloud, device inter-connectivity, etc. AirPods wouldn’t be any good without years of prior work on iOS. But they reportedly assign development costs roughly equal to manufacturing costs, which would put them at $60 and $100 of margin. This would make them contribute more to Apple’s target margin than the average product. This value is possible because of the state of the market, for whatever reason.

> Retail price of no-name, little-margin AirPods knockoffs corroborate this.

I want to push back on that because the no name brands are cost cutting by just repackaging cheap off the shelf bluetooth boards, speakers, and batteries. They do make for a perfecty serviceable pair of earbuds but they aren’t what you should be price comparing to which is other manufacturers making actual comparable products from Sony, Google, Bose, Beats, Samsung which range from $100-300 but mostly hover around $200. Go with a 50% markup from wholesale to retail and you’re looking at probably $100-120 real manufacturing cost.

You’re absolutely right about the difference in quality. The theory is that Apple‘a manufacturing scale gives them a competitive BoM, especially on small hardware that doesn’t require a premium processor or much storage. $100 in manufacturing would be too high as we know from teardowns that more expensive and complicated products like the watch are in that estimated cost range.

Apple also negotiates better margins on wholesale than 50%. They wouldn’t make much money on $170 AirPods otherwise assigning $60-70 research and manufacturing cost, let alone $100.

No, nowhere near $100 to manufacture a set of air pods! I would guess the marginal cost is closer to $10-$15.

If you add the cost of the tooling and manufacturing line, and NRE costs, maybe $25 a pair.

If Apple had a donation link, I'd donate an extra $250 to them per pair of AirPods that I've bought. They just work so darn well. Apple is the only reason there's pressure in the industry to make Bluetooth devices that actually work.

Samsung XCover6 Pro has a replaceable battery and a commitment to 5 years of maintenance updates.

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