why does storage capacity makes such a difference in pricing devices when the difference between 128gb and 256gb SD cards is only ~10$?
In: Economics
There are a few factors involved here.
1. Profit margins: if the manufacturer spends $10 extra for the 256gb SD, they have to mark the final product up even more in order to maintain profit margins. If they only charged the consumer $10 more they would basically have 0% return on the $10 they spent.
2. Accessibility: a lot of modern devices do not have accessible hard drives. It would take a well trained person and sometimes special tools in order to swap from a 128 to a 256. For this reason the manufacturer is able to sort of monopolize on the storage capacity. They can mark up the extra storage as much as they want knowing that an average user won’t be able to spend $10 and swap them themselves. This is probably reason number one. It’s also the reason why they market different capacities in the first place, rather than just putting ample storage into every device.
3. Production: in order to make a device with two different storage capacities, you either need two different production lines, or you make one, stop the line, swap the components for the other and start again. So in this sense you are partly paying for the time/capital used to market the different capacities.
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