General > General Technical Chat
Overpriced Stuff........
coppercone2:
but you can see I think also that high price leads to innovation. I think its amazing what people have done with the SDR platform. RF test equipment is generally expensive, and I think alot of people put their effort into SDR.. and that became a powerful tool that IMO lead to a kind of 'rf revolution', enabled tons of people to work with RF that would normally not mess with it. It is a different direction to head in, but it seems that the utility of those kinds of inventions are huge. Cheap hobby of the RTL-SDR lead to extreme proliferation, massive surge in polarity and a super increase in education and practical capabilities.
Maybe one can say the same thing about minicomputers and super computers. A much easier avenue for advancement of certain sciences came about because of the development of less capable and cheap microprocessors. I am not sure that distributed computing a substitute for traditional supercomputers (i.e. very sequential), I am sure that... new applications of those Cray type devices will eventually come up for specific problems that maybe distributed computing won't be able to adequately solve.. eventually... but we got a incredibly interesting and useful realm of science from intel's 4004.
Smokey:
--- Quote from: Berni on February 06, 2023, 07:15:20 am ---...
Things like specialized scientific equipment require a lot of expensive R&D to develop and don't sell many units, so the huge cost has to be spread over a small number of products. On top of that the money for the R&D might have come from investors that want to see a return on there investment.
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--- End quote ---
For sure. It's way easier make the case for something coming out of R&D having a higher cost. That profit needs to both pay back the R&D expense for that product but it also needs to fund the future R&D for the next thing.
--- Quote from: tooki on February 06, 2023, 08:33:57 am ---...
With that said, since you talk about “sold to industry”, maybe you’re not actually talking about retail, but about distributors. And yeah, they take a cut. But whether that’s bad is debatable, it depends on what value they add. I mean, buying parts in small quantities on Digi-Key, etc. is way more expensive than buying a reel from the manufacturer. But you’re paying for the convenience of being able to buy small amounts of each part, of parts from multiple manufacturers, all in stock at one place, as a consumer or small business that the manufacturers don’t actually want to deal with. And that’s why manufacturers like TI or Analog Devices outsource their own logistics to Digi-Key, mouser, etc.
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Our products used to go through distribution. And I'm not talking about Digikey, I'm talking about small specialized automation distributors. In order to carry your stuff, they want exclusivity contracts over some region in addition to adding a big markup to the final price. Since I also worked applications support, I heard from a number of customers that they loved our stuff and it worked great but the final price the distributors marked the thing up to was out of their price range so they went with something less expensive. That gets pretty frustrating.
--- Quote from: coppercone2 on February 06, 2023, 09:47:06 am ---but you can see I think also that high price leads to innovation. I think its amazing what people have done with the SDR platform. RF test equipment is generally expensive, and I think alot of people put their effort into SDR.. and that became a powerful tool that IMO lead to a kind of 'rf revolution', enabled tons of people to work with RF that would normally not mess with it. It is a different direction to head in, but it seems that the utility of those kinds of inventions are huge. Cheap hobby of the RTL-SDR lead to extreme proliferation, massive surge in polarity and a super increase in education and practical capabilities.
...
--- End quote ---
Like so many things, the low cost SDR stuff is a direct result of the cellphone industry demanding cheaper more integrated RF solutions so they can make phones smaller and cheaper. If the big name players hadn't spent a TON of R&D designing and manufacturing integrated single chip RF solutions we would all still be stuck piecing together discrete systems. But we all get the trickle down... sometimes...
It is frustrating that the really good stuff like broadcom chips are just impossible to get unless you are a megacorp willing to commit to 1M pieces before starting engineering.
Berni:
--- Quote from: Smokey on February 06, 2023, 06:46:50 pm ---Our products used to go through distribution. And I'm not talking about Digikey, I'm talking about small specialized automation distributors. In order to carry your stuff, they want exclusivity contracts over some region in addition to adding a big markup to the final price. Since I also worked applications support, I heard from a number of customers that they loved our stuff and it worked great but the final price the distributors marked the thing up to was out of their price range so they went with something less expensive. That gets pretty frustrating.
--- End quote ---
Yeah that's the sort of distributors i was talking about.
But goes for things like hardware stores too. The tiny things like brackets cost way more than a L belt piece of metal with a few holes should cost to make. Sure they might not have huge margins on an expensive lawn mower, but the tiny hardware parts are way overpriced. Yet i still go there because it is easy to just buy all of it in one spot rather than looking for specialized stores.
--- Quote from: Smokey on February 06, 2023, 06:46:50 pm ---Like so many things, the low cost SDR stuff is a direct result of the cellphone industry demanding cheaper more integrated RF solutions so they can make phones smaller and cheaper. If the big name players hadn't spent a TON of R&D designing and manufacturing integrated single chip RF solutions we would all still be stuck piecing together discrete systems. But we all get the trickle down... sometimes...
It is frustrating that the really good stuff like broadcom chips are just impossible to get unless you are a megacorp willing to commit to 1M pieces before starting engineering.
--- End quote ---
SDRs are mostly just a result of digital becoming so much cheaper than analog these days. It still makes sense to make a SDR without the integrated solution. The RF guts are still simplified when they are reduced down to a LNA feeding a mixer with a LDO that go right into a fast ADC. Then as the idea becomes popular chip vendors eventually create a chip that puts together all the building parts for the thing into one chip. At first it was about flexibility in things like cell basestations. Id say what really driven SDRs to be everywhere is the move to more complex modulation methods so that they could stuff more data into less spectrum. Those would be a pain to implement in analog and most of the time these modulations are carrying digital encoded signals anyway, so if you have the digital processing guts already, you might as well also do the demodulation in there.
What i would say cellphones pushed is higher integration of the analog RF black magic into single chips. It takes a whole lot of clever tricks to get good performance out of a RF chip that has things like LNAs PAs, mixers, filters..etc all on one piece of silicon. the actual consumer applications like cellphones, WiFi, DVB TV..etc then just piggybacked on that to make such chips cheep trough massive volumes.
Halcyon:
--- Quote from: AndyBeez on February 01, 2023, 09:25:25 am ---Any hardware containing the words 'enterprise', 'pro' or 'Apple'.
Actually it is not the stupid pricing that's the problem, it's the STUPID PAYING. People, just stop.
--- End quote ---
Enterprise gear is usually priced based on specs, features etc... Enterprise networking gear comes to mind. Compare stuff like Cisco or Ubiquiti to consumer offerings and you'll soon realise that the extra cost is worth it.
Consumer networking equipment is all gimmick and no substance. Utter garbage (mostly).
I just bought a TP-Link VDSL2 modem/router/wireless AP for a mate to replace his failing one and it's pure junk. It actually forces you to download an app and sign up for an account just to configure it. No settings in the web GUI at all (although it actually has a HTTP server and web interface for stats). It literally took me an hour to set up because of that garbage. The app kept throwing me out and I'd have to factory reset and start all over again, for no reason at all. Shit like this seems to be a common theme, not just with TP-Link.
Miyuki:
--- Quote from: Halcyon on February 07, 2023, 07:36:26 am ---
--- Quote from: AndyBeez on February 01, 2023, 09:25:25 am ---Any hardware containing the words 'enterprise', 'pro' or 'Apple'.
Actually it is not the stupid pricing that's the problem, it's the STUPID PAYING. People, just stop.
--- End quote ---
Enterprise gear is usually priced based on specs, features etc... Enterprise networking gear comes to mind. Compare stuff like Cisco or Ubiquiti to consumer offerings and you'll soon realise that the extra cost is worth it.
Consumer networking equipment is all gimmick and no substance. Utter garbage (mostly).
I just bought a TP-Link VDSL2 modem/router/wireless AP for a mate to replace his failing one and it's pure junk. It actually forces you to download an app and sign up for an account just to configure it. No settings in the web GUI at all (although it actually has a HTTP server and web interface for stats). It literally took me an hour to set up because of that garbage. The app kept throwing me out and I'd have to factory reset and start all over again, for no reason at all. Shit like this seems to be a common theme, not just with TP-Link.
--- End quote ---
Safety issues and backdoors were probably included, and no software patches will be ever released
It will probably freeze every few months (or worse weeks) and need to do a power cycle
This is not the kind of sh*t you want to deal with in any business
Yet many businesses fall into the trap of cheap equipment and then in the end need to pay for replacement with proper stuff
I see it commonly. Client outsources servers, storage, and networking to 3 different suppliers because it is cheaper than one integrated system from one vendor. And it never works reliably in the long term if they managed to bring it to life in the first place.
And after some time ends up tossing the "cheap" equipment, where they spend more on maintenance and outages and just buy a working system. ::)
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