• Yokemate of Keyboards
    Yokemate of Keyboards
    amigadave
    Posts: 2794 from 2006/3/21
    From: Northern Calif...
    Quote:

    Andreas_Wolf wrote:
    There seem to exist conflicting information as to whether or not the NRE costs for Cyrus (Plus) board development are passed on to the customers (as wasn't done with the Nemo board). Do you know more? (Unfortunately, takemehomegrandma didn't answer my question when I asked him 2 weeks ago.)


    No, I don't have any inside information regarding the pricing of the X5000 motherboards and complete systems, or how many of each of those items A-Eon will need to sell before they can recoup all of the design and production costs they have incurred doing the X5000 project. It just seems like an insurmountable amount to recoup, given the size of our community, and the statements and reports of A-Eon spending several hundreds of thousands of dollars, to design and produce the X5000. Sure, some of that reported investment must have included the Tabor A1222 motherboards, but the amounts mentioned still are so large, it seems to me that our community is too small to repay those amounts through purchases of A-Eon systems and motherboards. So, this is just an impression I have of the situation, not based in any facts, other than the numbers that have been reported, or stated by Trevor himself, regarding how much has been invested into design and production, plus rough guesses by myself on how much the bare components might cost and quick math to arrive at a very high number of boards and system sales, that would be needed to repay all investment monies. Even if the production cost of each system or board were doubled to arrive at the sales price (which for many products is true, but I doubt Trevor and Matthew are doing with the X5000 and A1222), it seems to me that approximately 300 to 400 X5000 complete systems would need to be sold just to get close to breaking even. Although no hard figures have been released for the number of X1000 sales, given the number of production runs, and the guessed at number of X1000's probably included in each production run, that 300 to 400 number is probably very close to the number of X1000's that were produced and sold. Are there enough users who did not purchase an X1000, plus existing X1000 users who are willing to upgrade, or add an X5000 to their collection, to reach 300 to 400 sales of X5000's? I don't know, but I am guessing that A-Eon is not doubling the production cost amount of their X5000 and A1222 systems and I believe that I am using a lower number than A-Eon's actual investment number, so both would make recouping all design and production costs harder, with higher numbers than I have noted above. I would love to be proved wrong, and have A-Eon make a profit, to help sustain their continuing work, investing in many different parts of this community, but it just seems unrealistic to me, given the size of our community, and their general tendency to want everything for little or zero cost. The number of users who are actually willing to spend thousands of dollars on a single system, is very small, and many users complain about prices for our software and hardware. Not an easy community to make a profit from, no matter how you slice it.
    MorphOS - The best Next Gen Amiga choice.
  • »16.12.16 - 15:35
    Profile