comradekingu
Glowing ember
The stuff that gets cheaper is not making known mistakes, which figures into support and maintenance. ED has largely been doing that sort of thing at cost of parts, not of labour.
Korea, as you may well know, is probably the most corrupt place to make hardware, so, seeing as it isnt made there, and ED isnt a huge corporation like those mentioned, and isnt korean, no.
Making the same thing, you are looking at much more than 50 dollars just in parts for the board alone.
Cases did get made in China for the pandora, nobody wants that, because it is a nightmare to make complex parts over phone every other week, in a language and culture far removed from Germany.
When you want to sell something, having a solid case adds value, having the likes of the pandora case, removes it, even if it is cheaply made.
The displays _are_ mass order, but they still cost 5-fold more than the batteries. And once you have either, they don't fit in your case by magic, and they have to be made to work, over time.
Or, and this is the case, Europeans are at work, in un-slavelike conditions, something you entirely forgot or didn't know about. The markup for the actual Pyra product is extremely generous compared to other flagship devices. Even so, because you are partly right about markup of sourced components, that is still the world. You don't get to paper-design anything if you want to call it a real product.
Things are expencive to buy, and they are expencive to put together. When you sell it you can either be greedy or not. From the standpoint of what actually goes on, rather than a made-up scenario, i would call this the most honest and open community product available, and I am involved in a lot of them.
What if I tell you that laptop is spying on you at every level of abstraction from the hardware up? This is detrimentally opposite, because it is not even EDs wish to spy.
So whos side are you on really? It is very hard to excuse spying and non-free software, having to exercise great effort to even have some level of freedom, when it can be an out-of-the-box deal.
If you go traveling farther than a stationary desk, you will find why laptops are inconvenient. They aren't hand-held, so you need a desk or similar, that gets old.
Also the laptop in question does not have any cellular capabilities, not even data. Or if it does, games are out.
A product with a community around it, that you are encouraged to hack, made to last, with modular parts, sturdy and ethical, with non-spying free software, is where the comparison really will tell you something is different.
You know when something sucks, like case-in-point laptop, where you go "why couldn't they have just" when you see a documentary about child-labour, or are annoyed at the garbage Win10 OS, hear the loud fan, don't have good input methods, etc etc etc
That is what you get, you get to have none of that, but you are still doing it, you want all of everything, and that is why we can't have nice things. You got the knowledge now, because I tried to be helpful, so maybe in the future we can spread that, and reap the benefits of expanding ethically.
