Comment on We don’t need 75-inch TVs, we need 75% off basic survival. 💀
Gladaed@feddit.org 21 hours agoArguing for cost of production vs cost of service offerings in a vacuum is the issue since. And trying to argue that they make their profit just in ads and services is the thing you shouldn’t do, as they do not add the TV cost they “subsidize” to their cost. Since profits are very slim any small source of income with low cost suddenly becomes the source of profit if you fudge the math this way. Imagine that they would sell remotes separately at high cost compared to the materials cost e.g. for 20 bucks. Then they could reduce the TV price by 20/buyrate dollars, lowering TV profits but have a high margin item they can tout to investors. Even though almost nothing changed they reduced their tv manufacturing profits without changing their total profits.
theparadox@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
I understand what you are saying. If they reduce the price of their TV (and the profit that TVs sales generate) they are just removing the profit from one category into another.
I honestly don’t have enough energy to write a better researched response - I spent more time than I wanted trying to find any numbers as it is.
If you want to believe that the gigabytes of data your TVs regularly send to their manufacturers and their business partners aren’t a primary driver of lower prices… and that it is really because it has become markedly cheaper to mine precious metals and manufacture semiconductors than it has to run factory farms, then go ahead.
Gladaed@feddit.org 20 hours ago
Manufacturing semiconductors has rather low materials cost. The challenge is actually turning the raw metals into a functioning device. And that’s been getting cheaper and by a lot. We aren’t hitting physical limits. Even in fucking batteries we are getting more and more capacity out of the same raw materials through better manufacturing.
Also as machines age their machine time tends to be valued less as compared to bleeding edge node machine time. Research has been paid.