From the outside it just does not look like everything possible is done to speed things up to me.
Very late tests of everything, long waiting periods before things get ordered, changing things after they where "ready for production" etc
That's simply the nature of the development of complex physical goods.
You can also see this in how many companies have manufacturing done in Guangdong. It's not because of the low costs of production in China, because by now you could do it significantly cheaper elsewhere. It's because of the local production chain. Need some exotic connector? There's probably a company around Guangdong that sells them in several variations. 200000 IR diodes need to be replaced by next week? Mass modifications to other existing products? If the suppliers are closeby, it can make production (and development) A LOT more smooth. This is because problems that only really become visible as you approach a physical mass production prototype can be resolved/bypassed more quickly.
Similarly, if you can't make a lot of prototypes, and the prototypes that you DO get to make take a long time to produce (and/or come from places far away), it can become very difficult to detect/anticipate problems. Even experience can only help you so much.
@EvilDragon /How/ much more would the cost have been at that plastics company around the corner from where you live?
Sure I have posted some impatient stuff to the effect of "Do we really need to fix a slight wiggle in the stylus holder?" and "at some point it does need to be good enough"
I do think that such a thing would need to be fixed. The proposition of the Pyra is that while it's "expensive" (still costs less than many smartphones, but ah well), it's you-get-what-you-pay-for style.
I've said this before, but what Ed is doing with the Pyra is very much a typical Mittelstand approach. The Mittelstand is the backbone of of the German economy, and... it's very resilient! Please have a look at the typical characteristics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand
"Good enough" is not a reasonable slogan if you build something that you couldn't do well with a killer retail price. It may "just" be a wiggling stylus, but the Pyra is a piece of hardware that fills its very own niche and doesn't really become "obsolete". It wouldn't make sense to leave in what some may describe as "unimportant" problems such as a wiggling stylus, if you can fix them.
I think that many here who have a Pandora that works fine may agree that if the quality of all the details was better, it would be quite a different device. If you held a Pyra in your hands and the build quality was just /better/ than that of a Pandora, everything being sturdy, nothing being loose, and lots of details being just /right/, then I bet that you'd agree that it's not just about whether the device works (let's talk again when you got your Pyra!). And as a company with a niche focus, this kind of thinking is a more than feasible approach in a competing world market...
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