The cost of products doesn't just come from the raw material used in it. What about R&D cost for example? There's a lot more to establish a product price than simply summing up material cost.
Good point. A quasi-resonant switching power supply takes about 10 person-months of development to get to production (according to "Power Supply Cookbook"). Multiplying by the cost of an engineer and dividing by 100 million chargers, works out to less than one cent for R&D. (Also, I expect STMicrosystems and Flextronics are doing most of the R&D.)
That's correct. In my experience, with such high volume opportunities, most semiconductor suppliers will provide their engineering expertise in doing (or supporting) not only the development but the reliability processes.
Unrelated to the OP, most normal people (rightly or wrongly) tend to ignore the value of time in general.
That's why people who otherwise make >$30 an hour will line up for 30 minutes for gas to save maybe $3 when they hear gas prices will go up the next day.
That's also why your relatives think nothing of your time before asking you waste several hours of your precious time to help fix their malware infested PC.
I hear this argument a lot but I just don't get it.
In almost every case the time spent doing those things (queueing for gas or fixing someone's PC) could, or better yet, would not have otherwise been spent making >$30/hour.
You could make the case (for argument's sake) that someone who works 8h/day for $30/h and sleeps 8h/day has an an awake time value of $15/h.
While this is definitely a frivolous and arbitrary calculation, it can be a useful metric for a busy person to figure out what his/her time is worth in terms of prioritizing activities. For example, waiting 30 minutes in line to save $3 in gas vs waiting 2 minutes and not getting the $3 savings.
Those 28 minutes could have been spent doing something else, such as quality time with the kids (priceless?), etc.
or to spin it back the other way, the psychological impact of "Hooray, I just scored a great bargain", even if actually provably false, might also provide a boost of happiness beyond the nominal opportunity cost. I wonder if there's a market in placebo coupons? :)
