hi,
Am Donnerstag 22 Dezember 2005 15:30 schrieb Marc Lavallée:
[...snip...]
My example was potato chips; it's harder to cook... Since we don't eat LEDs everyday, it's possible to pay more without going bankrupt; that's why some people are willing to pay. Like stereotypic hackers hate cooking, stereotypic artists hate soldering; of course, the market is smaller, but big enough for a microscopic business like Infusion Systems.
on ebay (at least in de) you can grab whoe sets of led's. they usually sell them in quantities of one hundred, including a resistor per led. the price is about 25 euro for that.
They were probably made in China.
most led's are produced in china or taiwan. the few producers that are not from there have comparable prices either, so that cant be the cause.
What would be your price to assemble a hundred LEDs?
are you joking? but if you really want to know, that would be a little below 1 euro, including material & time... after all, soldering one assembly id about 1 minutes, 2 minutes max. but i wont do that on a regular basis, because im not a company.
but the point is not what it costs if one does it in home-work vs. a ready-made product. the point is that even for a ready-made thing there is an upper-limit, imho. there are quite some other sources for such ready-built assemblies..... just look at all these robotic sites&shops. hey, even digikey offers to make such assemblies "on demand" and it only costs a fraction of the infusionsystems stuff.
even the construction of the infusion stuff isnt qualifying for that price. a piece of hose that shrinks when heated, so that the cables wont bend at the connections. thats common practice.....
It's common practice in your business...
what is "my business"? even the cheapest harddisk-led of a cheap computer case is assembled that way. its common practice in "that" business.
it is ok when ready-built things cost a bit more. but that stuff is really just a rip-off.
Then globalization is our friend...
Marc
not necessarily ....
anyhow, that thread got far off-topic now ..... ;)
greets,
chris