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by helsinkiandrew 817 days ago
> it's selling out Americans in favor of cheap labor.

Perhaps American workers. But an alternate take is that American consumers got cheaper chips and PCs - which resulted in more being sold, more companies and people using them, greater efficiency and new ideas and perhaps a more productive economy.

It will be interesting in 5-10 years if the US needs to tax/block possibly cheaper and better components built outside the US being sold

1 comments

Intel, like any other succesful company, prices its goods based on what the market will pay, not what it costs to make. Lower costs does not mean lower prices for customers, it means more profits for Intel.
> Intel, like any other succesful company, prices its goods based on what the market will pay, not what it costs to make

That may be true for Intel's CPUs but when products aren't produced by monopolies, those that have the cheapest costs and are in competition with others, often lower their prices to compete where the competitor can't. For example: AMD, graphics and motherboard parts

Well, I take it that it's always true and is a good lesson for anyone trying to set the price for their own product (like a hacked together side project one of us might be working on :) ).

My understanding is that the price should never be set based on production cost but on the value it brings to the customer. Thereby, a simple program you or I could hack together in a month, might have a cost of 10k in labor only cost, but if it would save the customer millions each year, they would pay a million for it.

So, you set the cost based on how much they are willing to pay, based on how much they would profit/save.

If another competitor offers a similar solution, you just undercut them by 10%, or invest another 10k for superior features.

Furthermore, up until at least a few years ago (i don't know how it is now) intel chips were more expensive than amd's, especially on server side, even accounting on performance/watt and intel adopted practices such as locking mobo to just one chipset and things like that. the situation might be different now tho