alt Hacker NewsHi there, shipping has a floor and then it scales, but it scales far slower than the order does.... so if you buy like one resistor from DigiKey or Mouser, that starts around $60, a hundred resistors costs about the same if you add chips and weight and it climbs from there, but $60 is the floor no matter how small the order....
So per unit shipping collapses with quantity, which is why the part price matters more here, not less. The fixed cost forces you to buy deep, and only the cheap part lets you buy deep. At a dollar a part, 1000 units is a $1060 order nobody here is placing... at ten cents it is $160, and then there are 1000 parts sitting in Trinidad that nobody else has to pay $60 to reach, so you can have enough for a small product run..keep in mind we also currently have US dollar shortage, so you only get allocated a certain amount of US per quarter....
I should also have been explicit that those figures are the Western channels like DigiKey, Mouser, courier from LCSC. WCH officially sells direct on AliExpress with free shipping, which runs on postal consolidation rates that do not price by how remote you are. But that channel is a game of chance. Sometimes things just never come, there is no ARM equivalent either. I cannot buy an STM32 from ST with free shipping to Trinidad, and I cannot trust the aftermarket parts because some of them are fakes, and some vendors do not have this country in their shipping list at all....
The part I care about most is that at ten cents I can hand a student a part they are allowed to destroy. Learning embedded means killing chips, and at a dollar a part a teacher flinches, cause 1 US dollar is about 7 dollars here, and starts supervising instead of letting people find out. And the same goes for me, at ten cents I can experiment and still ship with the part I experimented on....
> at ten cents I can hand a student a part they are allowed to destroy. [...] at a dollar a part a teacher flinches
Ah, I think that explains my confusion (in a different top-level comment[0]).
I read the wording in your article as you getting shipped "a dollar worth of chips" or "a dollar of chips", which to me sounded like you were talking about ordering multiple chips. So I assumed that the per-chip cost for ARM and RISC-V were close enough not to matter too much, and the shipping cost easily dominated.
But now I see it says "one dollar chips" (either I read it wrong initially, or you've updated it since I read it), which makes sense. $1 vs. $0.10 is a big difference at even smallish quantities. (My assumption was that the chip cost difference was more like 1.5x, not 10x.) And while the shipping costs are huge enough to dominate regardless, being able to order 10 chips vs. 100 chips for the same price (and presumably roughly the same shipping cost, even if it is high), is a big deal. The "allowed to destroy" bit is very real.
I thought your argument was about shipping costs, since that's what you focused on so much in the article, but the real issue is still the cost of the chips themselves. The ridiculous shipping cost you have to pay is certainly a factor, but I think a teacher in China would still flinch at giving a student an easily-destroyable $1 part, vs. a $0.10 part, even if their shipping costs are basically nothing.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323318