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A certain amount of the cost has to be apportioned to development time. Working in R&D myself, I know our company would be utterly sunk if someone decided to copy the instrument we sell and undercut us in the market. Thankfully it hasn't happened yet but there's always a chance. There were about 3 years of development put into that machine by a team of around 15 poeple - that's not cheap! We need to be able to sell this machine for up to 10 years to make our money back...
Of course, "developing" rounded corners on a phone didn't exactly cost Apple much, which is where the whole system breaks down. Yes, you should be able to defend your product in order to benefit from the large investment. No, you shouldn't be able to defend a design which would take any reasonable person a few minutes to come up with...
Edited 2012-01-05 14:05 UTC
What you made sounds very complicated, but what about watches?
In Turkey you can buy a Rolex replica that looks totally real (made in Asia). A Rolex Submariner is an relative old design (so no R&D costs to be won back), but a real one costs a lot more than a replica. So I'm guessing a lot of the costs goes to the well paid people in their beautiful buildings. If that is so than that expensive Rolex watch isn't really that valuable at all.
The seller of a fake Submariner paid 75 euros for it he told me. That includes material, assembly, wages and profit for the maker.




Member since:
2011-05-12
They are really good at copying stuff, right to the details and for a fraction of the costs, which makes you wonder why the real stuff costs so much.