For some reason I still cannot fathom, the 50-cent saving is a point of great pride to electrical engineers. They repeat some phrases about million-unit manufacturing runs and I just seethe with anger that we can't have nice things.
You can have nicer things, you just have to pay for it.
But because of economies of scale, you don’t just pay the difference in BOM cost, you pay that difference plus the difference in fixed costs divided by a much smaller unit run.
USB UPSes exist, and they’re really not that niche. Amazon has one for $50. That’s mass-market pricing as far as electronics are concerned.
As far as I can tell, there are a few no-name DC-only ups systems, but it would be really nice to have a USB-only DC-only ups that did things like USB-C with PD.
Good case study for Harvard Business School. When a design engineer wants to cut a feature to save a few pennies, they are teamed with a marketing pair-analyst to assess the TAM and margins, considered holistically with other feature subsets.
> 50-cent saving is a point of great pride to electrical engineers
As an engineer you are given a power budget, a thermal budget, a size budget, a weight budget and a monetary budget, among many other constraints. This means, like any engineering endeavor, there are tradeoffs to make. That 50-cents you saved on some power controller might be "spent" somewhere else that has a higher impact on the product.
There is a near infinite set of things you can do to make the product better somehow. Unfortunately you don't get to do them all. Many of the things conflict with eachother--more battery life might mean more weight and size that you have to "steal" from some other aspect of the product to balance out. Faster, better charging might cost 50-cents but that might mean in order to stay on budget you'd have to use a lower quality plastic shell that is more prone to damage. That faster, better charging might also eat into your thermal budget, meaning you'll need to spend more on cooling, weight and size.
I imagine it's a similar feeling of pride felt by the engineers who design outdoors equipment that only fits in the provided container when folded precisely how it was at the factory with no margin for error.
