"How much does Google Glass actually cost?"

Resource Teardown.com disassembled Google Glass and estimated points in the amount of slightly less than $ 100, at least so much are its components.

With the expansion of the Google Glass Explorer program last month, the number of buyers of techno-glasses has increased, as the number of more careful study of this device. After the second consumer wave got their glasses, some financially thrifty comrades began to protect their $ 1,500 devices from each other.

We have nothing to blame these comrades. For more than a year, Google has consistently held a price tag - $ 1,500 - which incites particularly curious users to “lend” glasses from a friend and find out how much of the price tag makes up its tiny components. Intangible costs, like development and research, are naturally accounted for in the cost of points, but how many percent does it make of the total cost of points?

According to the latest estimates from the resource Teardown.com - a subsidiary of the consulting group TechInsights, which itself was surprised last week of the approximate cost of components for Google Points : $ 79.98. This 94.7 percent underpricing was enough to make a Google spokeswoman make a short statement in the Wall Street Journal report : “absolutely wrong.”
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Glass received several requests to sort through the price components of the device, after launching sales last year, but no one received any answers, with the exception of the China Post report , especially the $ 30 projector-highlighting projector.

The Teardown.com resource estimate looks quite adequate, at least based on the wholesale prices of the components: a 5 megapixel camera - $ 5.56, a processor - $ 13.96, 16 GB of NAND memory - $ 8.18, and so on. But compared to the cost of the China Post components from 2013, the Teardown.com resource rating for High-PPI display / touchscreen and glass seems too cheap to be true: $ 3.

"25000 vs million"

"Our [approximate price] for a display device, flies in a dime, for those produces these displays," said Teardown.com resource expert from the Chicago office, Al Kowski. We add a simple projector with a prism to a display device (display), for a total of about $ 5, but even with that in mind, "we heard the opinion that a display device can cost even less."

Although Kovski is pretty much confident in his overall assessment, he easily recognizes that the report will soon undergo some changes. On the one hand, he and his team made a mistake, assuming that Glass uses a regular TFT display, in fact, Glass uses LCOS equipment. “We thought and decided it’s just a TFT display using a prism to project the picture,” says Kowski. “Apparently this is not so”

Since Teardown.com posted a report, Kovski immediately began to re-check the numbers of equipment manufacturers and IT experts. “Now 1000 pieces of LCOS projectors will cost you $ 30,” Kovski says, and he is confident that the price will be much lower for major buyers like Google. “With what volumes of purchases manufacturers reduce [price], I do not know. If Google buys 25,000 instead of a million, that is another matter. ”

The remaining components, on the other hand, were also found in other wearable devices and these devices are already on the market, a specific example is the Texas Instruments OMAP4430 chip. The price of these components may vary from the total order quantities, but Kovski, more than confident that the prices of processors, RAM, cameras and other components will always be stable.

Components vs R & D

“If I tried to guess, I would say that the final price will be somewhere between 90-95 dollars,” concluded Kowski, considering the price for the production of the dispel and other mechanical components. "The final price, of course, may be slightly lower." He cannot confirm when Teardown.com puts out an updated estimate of the cost of Google Glass glasses, “but this is definitely on our priority list,” Kovski said.

Fortunately for evaluators from Teardown.com, they were only interested in the wholesale prices of the cops of the points: “when it comes to development costs and the like, we did not try to give them an estimate,” says Kovski. "There are too many unknowns"

It would be fair to assume that the “price bridge” between the cost of “raw” components and the plastic part of the Glass case, as well as R & D and the cost of supporting Glass customers, making Glass a useful device, can be quite high. Limited sales are possible, as they could have influenced the price, or if you want: points are something new and rare, so that you pay the newly minted minions.

However, such a price spread is inappropriate if Google calculates that users will massively use (wear) glasses, while avoiding some restaurants and police in the process of using. In the meantime, Google is following its “explorer spans”, and the cost of components, ranging around $ 100, bodes well for a massive launch of glasses at a reasonable price, especially since comparable products, such as Android Wear , are trying to convince users that they should plunge into the wearable world.

P / S / Dear Habravchane, translating the article, I realized that the article is a reflection by the author on the data laid out by the resource Teardown.com. If this is not a Habra format, minus with pleasure - it will be a lesson for me.