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"We Listened" - Commodore Reduces The Price Of Its Forthcoming Callback 8020 'Dumbphone'
(www.timeextension.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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I'm on the Engineering side and $400 buys you parts for A LOT more phone than that, especially with that screen size.
Are they planning on having the phones individually hand-assembled by Degree holding Electronics Engineers in the US - hence the manpower costs are insane - or is it a situation of putting a jet engine on a small car (tons of memory and a big processor on something with a far too small screen to be useful for most things, especially gaming)?
I bet the price bares no relation to the actual product manufacturing costs.
Yes, but also, ROI on development and marketing and research costs etc. This is a niche product with no clear distribution channel. While cost to produce based on parts alone is low, what about procurement, planning, distribution, marketing, development etc? Everyone needs to make money to get the product off the ground.
Plus this is a completely unproven product (generally) static landscape. Price is basically dictated on how they can penetrate a market, gain market share, and still make profit after all the work that goes into making that a reality.
Those things are mostly a problem due to limited number of sales and thus lack of economies of scale, as they're mostly the kind of cost that are global rather than per-device hence the more the sales the less their impact in the device price.
That's the vicious cycle of "not enough sales for cheaper prices via economies of scale leading to higher prices leading to fewer sales" for hardware startups without massive upfront investor funding and the reason why, say, a Fairphone or Jolla Phone are a bit more expensive than one would expect.