[kragen]

What are the companies, or at least the industries, that would buy all the machines?

Ultimately what everyday people will end up using is whatever is cheap and works well enough. Right now NMR isn't cheap, and neither is FT-IR or XRD, but these things change over time. Benchtop NMR is already good enough for distinguishing between significant classes of contaminants that could be in your purported insulin.

I'm typing this on a 50-gigaflops computer, which is faster than the Cray Y-MP Los Alamos had back in the 01990s, and people routinely buy teraflops video cards now, any one of which is faster than ASCI Option Red, if you remember that. I just drank a mass-produced soft drink out of a can made of aluminum, the metal Napoleon III preferred to gold to exhibit his wealth. Last year Chinese companies brought three covid vaccines to market within six months of the disease's discovery and started mass vaccinations, though most observers had predicted a minimum of 18 months. SpaceX is routinely landing reusable rockets on their tails now, and the world's energy infrastructure is rapidly shifting from fossil fuels to solar.

Things change. Today's science fiction is tomorrow's old news.

[dekhn]

Some things change, but to make NMR cost effective would be cheating mother nature. The entire technique is based on producing a strong and homogenous magnetic field that can hold a lot of sample, only to probe the sample with weak RF and listen to its faint echoes.

Industrial diamonds got "cheap" but large ones never did.

[kragen]

You could be right; certainly you know a great deal more about the subject than I do.

What are the companies, or at least the industries, that would buy all the machines if you could make them much cheaper and/or better?

[dekhn]

any purveyor of fine chemicals (polymers, etc) and petroleum processing company (hydrocarbon analysis).

[kragen]

Thank you very much!

[fabian2k]

You can't really escape the physics here, you need a very strong and very homogeneous magnetic field for NMR and very sensitive electronics to detect the signal. That's not something we can do for cheap right now.

And even beyond that I don't think the area has enough volumen and is competitive enough to produce significantly lower prices. The high-field NMR area is almost a monopoly right now, the benchtops and lower field instruments are somewhat competitive. But even those are in price areas far beyond someone doing synthesis at home.

[kragen]

As I asked you above, how sensitive do the electronics need to be? How weak is the signal?