4 Jan
2010
4 Jan
'10
4:43 p.m.
On Jan 4, 2010, at 11:28 AM, Brian Lanning wrote:
This kind of thing makes me insane. I would have gladly paid another
$1, or even $10, had they just put the parts on the board. I have a
hard time believing (i.e. prefer to believe) that this would be purely
a cost cutting move.
I bet there real reason had to do with the transition from 8-bit to
16-bit add-on cards. ...
It was definitely a cost-cutting move.
Back in 2003 or so I was working on a commercial product for mass
production. After the prototypes were working great, the owner of
our very small company (a tyrant with no common sense whatsoever)
sent my design to a "cost engineer" to "engineer the cost out of
it". (his words) It came back with such wonderful "improvements" as
swapping out those nice low-ESR capacitors in my switching regulators
with cheaper ones whose ESR was through the roof, which of course
rendered the power supplies nonfunctional. Without the power
supplies, I obviously didn't get any farther in testing. ;)
It's amazing what management types will do to increase their
profit margins by even a tiny bit. I'm sure in production quantities
that the cost savings was much less than $0.50 per slot, but still,
even if it were $0.10 per slot, add that up over a production run of
25,000 boards and you end up with another few thousand bucks that the
suit can later arrange to steal from the company.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
Does anyone know why the connectors were left off the
board in
the first
place? It seems kind of silly since they went to the effort to
route the
signals and have the holes drilled.
To save $0.50 per slot, I'd imagine.