Re: No headphone jack
"...it consumes a miniscule amount of space and it costs pennies..."
Many years ago in the very early 90's, one of the jobs I had was repairing Sharp electronic typewriters and word processors.
The most popular typewrite that Sharp did was also their cheapest and simplest - no memory, no bells and whistles at all - it was basically a solenoid for the hammer and a stepper motor for the daisywheel and another for the platen. You could pick them up in Boots at the time for less then 50 quid.
I went to their factory in, as I recall, Wrexham.
Speaking to one of their managers, one of our guys queried why they'd stopped putting two screws in to hold the metal frame into the case and had started to use a clip moulded into said case. They were quite brittle and if you weren't careful, it was quite easy to snap them.
The manager from Sharp said they'd done some calculations and because the process to put the components together were manual, it meant they could remove one person from that assembly line.
When scaled out, they saved 9p per screw (this included the person). They sold 100,000 units a year in the UK alone.
So those things that cost pennies start to save you a large sum of money when scaled up into the hundreds of thousands.
I'm not defending it - just giving one of the possible rationale.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
