[willis936]

It's really not the BOM cost that drives these decisions but the assembly cost of adding placements. Time on the assembly line is very valuable and doesn't have a simple / clean representation on a spreadsheet. It's dependent on the market and right now assembly line time is worth a lot.

[f1shy]

That is exactly the reality. I work in a place where we build HW. The resistor costs almost nothing. But installing it, having it in stock, making sure the quality of yet another component is correct, eventually managing another vendor, all costs. So much, that the cost of a resistor we put a value of some cents (up to ten) even when the part itself cost so little that the software has problems tracking it.