[nwh]

Completely different situations. Actually building an ASIC design is expensive, has a lot of cost in research and development, and the batch sizes are in the millions of dollars. You do benefit from scale of supply in the chips themselves, and you don't need to worry about pretty consumer cases and electrical safety certifications. Once you've paid off the R&D cost you're basically in the green (bitfury sold his up until this point, then abruptly stopped).