[krapht]

Eh, no, that's not how it works in high-volume manufacturing. There are 70 million washing machines sold per year. Suppose your large conglomerate employer sells 0.7% of that total, or 700,000 units. It doesn't take much of a per-unit savings to pay for the salary of a FTE to optimize the design.

[simias]

Maybe, you have to see if the cost of having independent components (dev time, prototyping etc...) is worth the few cents saved on the BoM.

Then you have to consider that IC designs are usually easier to reuse since they're more flexible, if you can have a single design with different firmwares for your entire line of products vs custom hardware for every design. Even if you sell 700k units/year you probably have a few models in your inventory, each selling for a fraction of that.

Beyond that it's pretty common for modern appliances to come with so-called "smart" features that require more processing and more IO capabilities. It's not rare for modern coffee makers to come with a color screen instead of the good old 7 segment displays.

So really the equation is not that simple, especially for higher end models that will have a more expensive BoM overall and a lower number of units sold.