Tony has it
right. The market demands low prices and doesn't demand
ruggedness, so that is what gets built.
It's a great pity there aren't
enough people out there who would pay
for a good design for such a product to be comemrically viable.
I think there probably are - there are at least as many as there were
back "30 or 40 years ago", and, while many things have changed, I doubt
anything has changed that would make it significantly more costly to
sell to that market now than then.
What _has_ changed is that then, that market was pretty close to all
there was for market for small computers. Now, it's a microscopic
fraction of a vastly larger market, and there are few-to-no companies
that can resist the lure of switching to the much bigger pond, on the
theory that even if that means turning from a relatively large fish
into a relatively small one, it still ends up being a bigger fish in
absolute terms.
Reinforcing that is the democratization of manufacturing. Today, it is
far more feasible than it was 30-40 years ago for an end user to design
a machine and have a one-off board made (and sometimes even populated
and soldered); that's gotten cheap enough that, adding in the "doing it
myself means I get exactly what I want" factor, it competes with
companies trying to sell to that market.
Not that I _like_ any of this. Well, possibly except the last, and
that hasn't gone far enough yet for me to be really happy about it
(there aren't very many choices yet for open tools for that stuff, and
the ones I've found have..problems).
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