[coder543]

The required resistors are literally a tenth of a penny each ($0.0011/ea) on DigiKey[0], probably cheaper elsewhere. You need two of them. Two tenths of a single penny. Exway is charging between $350 and $1650 for their skateboards, from what I can see on their website.

I highly doubt this was done for cost reasons, even including the additional assembly costs, which for surface mount resistors would be very low. This feels like a design error, and I doubt the support emails went anywhere meaningful.

[0]: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/chip-resistor-sur...

[didntknowya]

materials costs are not the only consideration. they have to arrange for a secure supply, retooling, QC checking etc. to do it properly.

I imagine they got the cheapest engineer to make a functioning product. Changing their whole production line for a $0.001 component is hardly worth their time in this product segment, however debatable the ethics or PR of it is.

[coder543]

Again, they're selling products worth nearly $2000. I'm not talking about changing their production line. I'm talking about why this happened in the first place. You said it was to save money because "adding extra chips is not worth it". I highly doubt it. This appears to be a design error. A design error while saving money on engineering? Maybe, but that isn't what your first comment said.

[kelnos]

C'mon, dude, we're talking about SMT resistors, which I'm sure are already used elsewhere in their design. If any electronics company in the world can't "secure" a supply of SMT resistors, we have much bigger problems.

I agree that doing even a small redesign of something existing isn't free, but every company comes out with new designs for new products or to make an existing product more cheaply. At the very least they could acknowledge the issue and put the fix on the queue for the next rev of the board.

My guess is that the support person didn't actually forward anything on to any engineering team. At most they sent it to their supervisor, who told them to just make OP go away.

[MBCook]

That’s to change it. There would have been no additional cost to do it right at the start other than the resistors.

[kevincox]

I don't think anyone is expecting them to release a new revision for just this change. They are just asking that the next revision includes this fix with the other changes that would justify a new revision anyway.

[imtringued]

You apparently have no idea how electronics are manufactured.

There is no such thing as "changing the whole production line".

Also, the marginal value the additional components provide exceed their costs by such a wide margin. The ROI is easily in the 10000%.