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by callalex 986 days ago
You can thank terribly written intellectual property laws for that exclusivity. It’s not like inverters are some kind of new technology, and yet here we are.
1 comments

I suspect the inverter design is now cheaper too.

The traditional design needs all power to go through a transformer. A 1 kilowatt 60Hz transformer necessarily uses a lot of copper and steel. The inverter design can use MOSFETs (theoretically cheap, but a reasonable IP cost) and far less copper and steel.