How to calculate a price for the Pyra


Actually, GPD first made plans of the XD public by providing some rough details of it to a Dingoonity user named skelton, the purpose was for him to get community feedback .  Over half the community asked for a keyboard to be added into it.   Unfortunately GPD were too advanced in there designs to add a keyboard, but for a while there it looked like it was going to happen.  I thought at the time, that was a big bullet dodge for the Pyra, would have been hard to compete with a similar device that  costs  a 1/4 of the Pyra's price

Mind you, when GPD come to next designing an update for the XD, might not be so lucky.
 
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I might have missed someone already mention, but another small thing that goes into the 'money equation' is that a person needs a certain amount of money each month to live, say 1,500 EUR (to cover rent, food, bills, going out), so if a product is sold, and zero profit is made, the person would be -1,500 EUR each month. If each device makes 150 EUR profit (after business overheads, paying back device R&D, etc.), then selling 10 devices would be enough money for cover the basics. If by bringing a reseller onboard, instead of selling 10 devices, 20 devices would be sold each month, these extra devices wouldn't need to be helping towards the 1,500 EUR of living expense.

This doesn't at all disagree with what ED said in terms of you need to be able to offer resellers a discounted price (otherwise the resellers wouldn't have any reason to do their job), but what it does mean is that there is actually a certain amount of 'automatic' discount that could be applied once basic living costs have been paid for. For instance, if it works out each Pyra pays 5 EUR towards EDs 1,500 EUR living costs, and ED is already making 1,500 EUR per month without resellers, he could offer a 5 EUR discount to resellers, the Pyra project wouldn't be any worse off, however it would mean after ED is making 5 EUR less than he could (although he is still making enough to cover the project and his living expenses).

The question of should ED receive less money once he has made a certain amount each month, the answer is ED should do whatever he likes! :) I think everyone agrees he should make money, he has invested, he deserves a reward.
Restricting income to only what would cover expenses sounds like a continuous financial train wreck.

Costs include labor.  ED and anyone working for him should draw a paycheck.  The community can and does volunteer resources, but are under no 'commitment' to do so, so THAT is different.

ED's company should make profit.  Note this should be above and beyond what he and his employees are paid.

Much like ED's company, re-sellers are in business to make money.  The same rules apply.

Anything less would be charity work.  I can almost see the point in begging companies to do at-cost charity production for medication, food and shelter for the needy.  I do not see any point in a company selling a top (only) in class handheld computing and gaming device being charitable.  The Pyra is, by definition, a luxury device.  It isn't a 'need'.  It is a 'want'.  Those who bring it to us should not be expected to donate their time, money or talents.

I think Steven gets this, that the project needs to act and make money as a business.  But it is clear that several of the above posters are assuming that this project is done as a charity production.
 
It definitely needs to make money and be a business. I think the Pyra will do okay and hopefully expand a little beyond the the niche that the Pandora occupied.
 
ED is producing a wonderful device that I want, and deserves to profit from it. Seeing how much I use my Pandora (I even bought a 1ghz since I used my CC so much) I will be buying a Pyra.  Since I am not late to the Pyra game like I was with the Pandora (bought both of mine used), I also want to purchase it directly from ED so he can see the full profits for his endeavor

I am curious if the cost has been worked out more. Last I saw it was ~$500-600
 
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Please dotnt:


Its negative for the sales:


Whyle you work on the Pyra , your Husband can Play some games on it via HDMI and Gamepad..


So you only need one Pyra for 2 Users..
 
Wow, a stable image and the rotator chip actually rotating stuff already?  I hadn't heard about that, so seeing it now is really awesome!

P.S. Perhaps it'd be better if this video had been posted to the latest news post instead of this sticky.  Can a mod split the discussion?
 
Wow, a stable image and the rotator chip actually rotating stuff already?  I hadn't heard about that, so seeing it now is really awesome!

P.S. Perhaps it'd be better if this video had been posted to the latest news post instead of this sticky.  Can a mod split the discussion?
I noticed that ED has been making official threads when he has time, so this will probably be included in the next one.  Maybe some time this week is my guess.
 
Restricting income to only what would cover expenses sounds like a continuous financial train wreck.
You sort of have to see the bigger picture; what I mean is my example of ED making exactly 1,500 EUR per month, by selling 300 Pyra's with a 5 EUR profit is just an example. What actually happens is at the start of the month ED needs to make his business profit, some of this business profit will then be paid to him for personal use (including his personal bills, spending money, etc.), if the amount he needed to make is 1,500 EUR per month, at the start of the month he has zero, and he doesn't know what he'll sell, if it was just one item, he'd need to make a crazy profit on that one item (lets face it, this business model wouldn't work very well!). If instead he is confident he will sell 500 units, he can then set the amount of profit he needs to make per unit accordingly. Now if he has a stable set up, and looks at resellers as an option to sell further units, say this doubles the units he sells, he *could* make a little less on each unit he sells to the reseller and *still* make money (both on the units he sells personally, the ones he resells). As I originally said, ED should do whatever he wants, there is no obligation to offer any specified price to anyone, ultimately the consumer is king: if you don't like it, don't buy it.
 
Restricting income to only what would cover expenses sounds like a continuous financial train wreck.
You sort of have to see the bigger picture; what I mean is my example of ED making exactly 1,500 EUR per month, by selling 300 Pyra's with a 5 EUR profit is just an example. What actually happens is at the start of the month ED needs to make his business profit, some of this business profit will then be paid to him for personal use (including his personal bills, spending money, etc.), if the amount he needed to make is 1,500 EUR per month, at the start of the month he has zero, and he doesn't know what he'll sell, if it was just one item, he'd need to make a crazy profit on that one item (lets face it, this business model wouldn't work very well!). If instead he is confident he will sell 500 units, he can then set the amount of profit he needs to make per unit accordingly. Now if he has a stable set up, and looks at resellers as an option to sell further units, say this doubles the units he sells, he *could* make a little less on each unit he sells to the reseller and *still* make money (both on the units he sells personally, the ones he resells). As I originally said, ED should do whatever he wants, there is no obligation to offer any specified price to anyone, ultimately the consumer is king: if you don't like it, don't buy it.
Mmm...  you seem to be under the impression that the objectives are to make as little money off of the project as possible and that anything above direct hardware costs goes into ED's pocket.

Any business that can't make payroll is insolvent.  DragonBox needs to pay it's employees, including ED for their time, labor and expertise.  THAT should take care of their personal living expenses.  That is a project COST, not a destination for profit.

Profit defines as the money made by DragonBox above and beyond the costs to produce, pay labor, stock, market, ship, cover regulatory expenses, licensing fees, etc...  Profit is the money that the company then decides to distribute to it's shareholders/investors or reinvest in order to make more profit from the profit or hold onto for future business needs.

So, the individual living expenses of the company's employees has nothing to do with profit other than it's impact on the employees negotiating position for additional resources (costs).
 
Mmm...  you seem to be under the impression that the objectives are to make as little money off of the project as possible and that anything above direct hardware costs goes into ED's pocket.

Not at all; I'm not really sure where you are getting these ideas from. ED needs to sell stuff to bring revenue to his business. As well as money coming into his business, there is of course expenses going out. ED would most likely prefer to see more money going in than going out (although there are lots of 'successful' business which do not do this). Each item ED sells has a direct cost associated to it, on top of the direct costs there are the indirect costs required for the business. If ED breaks even each month, then the indirect costs would need to be paid for by making sure he charges enough for what he sells to cover both the direct cost of the item plus some extra. If however, he uses resellers, and sells another 1,000 items, those 1,000 items do not have to pay towards a lot of the indirect costs (as they have already been paid for). Hence it is possible to charge a little less, and not lose any money. I have said also that he isn't forced or even compelled to do this, he can make as much or as little profit as he chooses, it is his business. I am struggling to make it any simpler to understand, but to be fair all of my posts have been rushed to type, so sorry if it isn't explained as clearly as possible.
 
It's like saying the analogy is that you want a wooden chair with a cupholder in it and you have to pay thousands to get it hand made. You don't really care about getting a hand made chair, you just want this one modification. And you wish the other companies would make a chair like that because they're already doing the other 90% of the work to make it and they know how to/have access to methods for making cheap chairs.


What if there was a company that bought off-the-shelf chairs and glued off-the-shelf cupholders onto them? Anybody who is paying attention can see how much work is involved in making the pyra. They're engineering this thing from scratch, and that's no small feat. A lot of the cost of the project-as-a-whole comes from designing, testing, prototyping, re-prototyping, and setting up manufacturing for what will end up being a relatively a small run of finished products. What if instead of completely reinventing the wheel, you find something that's already 90% circular and just round off the edges?


However the hell they're doing it, there are any number of no-name chinese factories pumping out decent-spec smartphones for practically nothing. Here's a phone with a 5" 720p display, MT6735 SoC (64bit A53 w/ mali t720), 2GB RAM, and 16GB flash for all of $122.  They've already designed, tested, and tooled up to build the system board.  They've already sourced the components and are manufacturing these in (presumably) decent quantities.  Why can't you just call up Mr. DOOGEE and say "I'd like to place an order for 2000 of your finest Valencia2 Y100 Pro phones please - do you think you can cut me a break on the price if I don't need the frame, glass, battery, back cover, packaging, or accessories?"  I'm not an expert, but I suspect the answer is "Absolutely!"


Now obviously have no idea how conducive this particular SoC would be to a pyra-like project, but out of the hundreds of cheap chinese phones out there, somebody has to be already making something suitable.  Asus and lenovo are both making inexpensive intel atom-based smartphones - if you could rope one of them into this kind of deal, imagine what you could do with an x86 SoC that is well documented and already has linux support.  That's a good chunk of your development and manufacturing work already sorted.  


What about the rest of it though?  I admit you're going to have to make the case and lower PCB from scratch, but there's still room to be clever.  With the brains of the system up in the lid behind the display, your lower PCB will likely only need 2 layers - much easier to design and cheaper to make.  Some parts can still be outsourced.  Instead of making your own QWERTY keymat/keycaps, buy a bunch from whoever makes this thing - if they can sell the whole deal for $27, the keypad can't cost more than a dollar or two.  Maybe you can find a cheap gamepad with decent buttons/dpad and buy those as well.  Anything you can buy pre-made will cost less than designing and making it yourself.


I have to think that a franken-pyra would be cheaper and faster to make than the ground-up approach.  I'm almost afraid to guess how much cheaper, because there are a lot of variables that I can't make educated guesses about.  But certainly it would be cheaper.  If only I had a few hundred grand lying around and some reliable Chinese manufacturing partners...


I know this is getting borderline offtopic, but this concept has been stuck in my head for the last couple weeks.
 
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Now obviously have no idea how conducive this particular SoC would be to a pyra-like project, but out of the hundreds of cheap chinese phones out there, somebody has to be already making something suitable.

You can't 'frankenphone' anything on the market to something that meets Pyra design specs. Just one example: None of them have Dual-SD slots.
 
Now obviously have no idea how conducive this particular SoC would be to a pyra-like project, but out of the hundreds of cheap chinese phones out there, somebody has to be already making something suitable.

You can't 'frankenphone' anything on the market to something that meets Pyra design specs. Just one example: None of them have Dual-SD slots.
Actually - to meet the Pyra spec, it would need to be tripple SD slots.  But, you have the right idea.

A Raspberry Pi is a pretty small motherboard - not far from cell phone sized.  In order to 'make it portable' using off the shelf components, the resulting franken-portable-pi winds up being the size of a 1980s laptop.  Use of off-the-shelf components that were not designed to fit together both snug & perfect will by default result in a device that is, "larger than it absolutely must be".

Remember that a primary constraint on the Pyra's design is that it MUST fit in a pocket.  The current Pandora and Pyra designs are already at the stretched limit of that primary constraint.  THAT is why everything MUST be custom created.  There are no 'off the shelf' components that perfectly fit the design constraints.

Combine that size constraint with needing two analog controllers, a VERY nice game pad, two shoulder buttons, a full-on PC capable multi-lingual keyboard, high quality speakers, ports out the wazoo, wireless, high resolution screen, clam shell design so it is self-protecting, etc all crammed inside that limited space constraint and you have a Pyra.  A unique design that should not be compared to cheap Chinese cell phones.

The Pyra isn't a phone.  It is a multi-function general purpose clam shell Linux Debian computer with high quality gaming controls, audiophile sound, wireless networking, more connection ports than many current laptops which, by the way, still fits in a front pants pocket.  Anyone who tries to compare the Pyra to a phone simply doesn't get it.
 
I do not understand why we Europeans need to sponsor the shipping costs for the US customers.

US customers do not pay VAT to start with.

This implies that you could keep the price basically the same for both.

With the extra 20% you pay either the VAT in Europe or the shipping to the US.

Then there are also distributors (like ThinkGeek, Ithic.com, GetDigital.de, etc.)

They also want at least 15 - 20% profit (they've got huge shipping costs from Germany to US as well) - which leads to a price of about 500 EUR.

Of course, they won't be happy if I sell it for a lower price as they do - so I would need to calculate with that price as well.

In our scenario, we'd have a final price of about 499 EUR.
 
Shipping 1000 units to US should cost about 800 - 1000 USD.

So that's 1 USD more per unit...
 
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