$380,000 spent designing one tiny part of a laptop

You can’t always see the tab thing — too dark, black plastic, etc. Sometimes you can’t see the port at all. At least with the B connector you can easily feel its orientation with a fingertip.

It sounds like impressive attention to detail. Unless $350K of it was spent in endless soul destroying meetings in which the management droned and the rest of the team considered homicide/suicide. Bonus horrors if everyone pitched in, came to a consensus, then the boss had a brainfart the next morning and restarted the whole process. 8 times. In which case it sounds truly awful.

Really, the vast majority of meetings are more like something out of Lovecraft, a gibbering horror that leaves any sane person clinging to rationality.

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Agreed on the darkness bit as that’s the one that most frequently gets me. Sometimes it’s on the back of things so you know the location but not the orientation. Luckily the system I previously described is pretty standard across products :smile:

Hello,

I wonder if any of the money was spent on ruggedizing the USB ports? Everything from improving how they are mounted on the system planar or daughtercard to better solder pad contact to ensuring the plastics that won’t crack over time due to using the wrong fillers.

I’m not an engineer, but I have seen enough broken USB ports to know that they can suffer from various electrical and mechanical problems, especially if the person plugging devices in isn’t careful.

Given the cost of this notebook computer, I hope it has a very good warranty policy for these kinds of custom parts.

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I get it, too. Someone (he?) had the idea that the color was going to match the company’s logo and then he couldn’t let it go.

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Yeah if the lighting is good and you have decent eye site, but does anyone actually look? No. That makes way too much sense.

Fast Co Design’s Dan Nosowitz sees, in a very expensive gaming laptop, the hand of Jobs

Ironic, given that Jobs was reputed to not like computer gaming. And I had certainly never thought about Min-Liang Tan in that way. But I can see it: in the last console generation, Razer made PC and X-Box controllers, but not PS3 ones. It’s an obvious moneymaker, converting your existing controller line to another major console, so why not? And the answer was, Because Min-Liang Tan did not play the Playstation 3. He seemingly creates what he is passionate about making, not just what will make him money. Hard to find an industrialist with that kind of ethos, apart from Jobs.

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Based on my experience with a Razer mouse, it’ll probably start randomly double-clicking when you want to single-click.

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Razer PR is full of shit. They “unveil” 3D Studio mockups of revolutionary products that never make it to market all the time. They have fundamentally revolutionized computer gaming on about a dozen different occasions, without anyone in the wider world actually noticing. At this stage I wouldn’t trust them to tell me what day of the week it is.

Oh, case in point:

And when they do release something, this is what they make:

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I recall in Jobs’ biography reading several examples of similar attention to minute aesthetic details at the cost of increasing the product’s price, such as not being happy with the look of any of the available screws’ heads and insisting on having custom screws manufactured, or not liking the appearance of a motherboard (invisible to the end-user) and demanding that it’s components be rearranged, not for any engineering-driven reason, purely for fashion sense.

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Obsesses over the distinct shade of acid-green for a part of his product that is essentially going to be ignored, and pays through the nose for it. Sounds like this guy inherited the worst of Jobs: He’s Lisa-era Jobs, when what you want is Next- or, ideally, iPod-era Jobs.

As far as Razer is concerned they should aim for current era Jobs.

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If you’re designing $80+ mice and $300+ keyboards that require persistent Internet connections to function, you’re doing it wrong.

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I’ve only used Razor mice but it was a good experience.
As for the USB port being green, $380K seems a small price to pay to have bespoke USB ports in y our product line. And for that investment, they can continue to obtain those custom colored USB ports for the rest of their product line. That’s the kind of marketing and brand/device recognition Microsoft pays billions to achieve. You see a device with a green USB and you know who made it.

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I have a feeling that $380k figure is the lump sum of the salary of every employee even remotely involved in the process, as if they were working on it full time for the entire time they spent working on the USB port design. And considering the CEO himself was highly involved (and even flew to Taiwan himself to double check the process), I imagine that bumped the cost-on-paper quite a bit. Add in several flights back and forth to Taiwan, hotel costs for employees over there for weeks, bonus pay for having to spend Christmas and New Year’s in Taiwan looking at green plastic, I can see the number easily reaching $380k, if you’re creative enough with your accounting.

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plus i’d be pissed if i were those engineers that had to miss holidays for a fucking color.

in fact, i would have made them evergreen, like my xmas tree at home and said “ho, ho, fucking ho, asshole”

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But we’re all talking about it.

[quote=“teapot, post:17, topic:25524”]
That being said, the 380k figure would also likely include all the wages and travel costs they spent on working on this thing. Their staff were at the factory over xmas and new year so i’m guessing they got a pretty sweet deal out of it.[/quote]

Oh yeah. Even conservatively assuming that those three top engineers make $120k/year, that’s over $20k of salary alone, plus another $15k of benefits, plus $20k travel expenses, plus the salaries of the guys back home working on it, plus whatever the factory was charging for all of this bespoke work. It adds up real quick, especially when you’re trying to come up with a “big” figure that will sound impressive to a reporter.

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I just did a quick spot-check: a 17" Razer Blade Pro costs between 2475 GBP and 3050 GBP on amazon.co.uk. A 14" model seems to cost between 2050 GBP and 2770 GBP also on amazon.co.uk.

The highest-end MBP retails for 2800 GBP, thats with an i7 2.6GHZ quad proc, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of flash-based storage.

At first glance it just seems like someone thought that the Apple model of selling commodity hardware at premium prices by claiming that they really, really care about design was an excellent way of making quite a lot of money. However, as I’m not a gamer, I suppose there are things I’m missing.

Note especially the age of the company: 3 years. Whether or not it’s expensive, it’s highly noteworthy as it perfectly shows the increasing speed of putting these things together.