Submarine looks like a shark, jumps 12 feet into the air, article/gallery. Price: "upwards of $100,000". I would actually have expected more. This is after all a product with a very limited production run, I'm sure, and those don't have the economics of scale to push down price.
Actually, I don't think we generally realize how much economics of scale, mass production, is doing to make things cheap. You can get a DVD player these days practically for the price of a ten-pack of cigarettes. Imagine what it cost to create the first one, and what the price would have been if there was only a market for ten of them.
But we get used to things very quickly, and instead of being grateful for the amazing bounty that industry is giving us, we get pee'd off if we have paid $200 for a digital camera and then see we could have gotten it somewhere else for $170.
Update:
"We put two dollars worth of medical insurance in every keyboard we sell. Now, I can tell you, I mean I can buy a keyboards from the Far East vendors today for three bucks."
(From here.)
And this is after they have been shipped around the world!
I've heard the original VCRs cost about a thousand dollars. My DVD player, bought nine years ago, cost nearly $400. Now as you say they are about the cost of a pack of cigarettes. For a regular one anyway, not Blu Ray. Even the super rich are scaling back a bit these days though, as supercars aren't selling nearly as well as they used to. Pity those poor schmos at Bugatti.
ReplyDeleteI was exaggerating, but you *can* get them under thirty dollars, which is amazing.
ReplyDeleteI heard that cheap keybords cost like... well:
"We put two dollars worth of medical insurance in every keyboard we sell. Now, I can tell you, I mean I can buy a keyboards from the Far East vendors today for three bucks."
Here.