I too have seen the intense penny pinching, here in California the soda bottler removed one thread from the tops of plastic bottles, it saves probably a fraction of a cent in plastic, but makes the detached retaining ring for the cap rub on your lips when drinking. That makes it uncomfortable to sip from those bottles. Such a huge price to pay in user dissatisfaction for such a small savings.
Can't go this far though :
> I wish someone cut out sales people from the design
> process. ... no optimizing for better sellability.
In my experience, actually doing things this way leads to less economic success for the product and eventually it gets outsold by a competitor without those restraints. And At FreeGate I told sales people "you have to sell what we have, not what we don't have" and still had them come back with complaints about how the competitor could install their box in a data center etc etc. Not a productive conversation (or fun for that matter).
There does seem to be a minimally required feature set for selling things these days. "High Quality" isn't the compelling feature it once was.
There's some penny pinching, for sure - I had a coworker whose brother is on the iPhone hardware team and they have a lot of trouble with samples coming back from manufacturing with the wrong resistor here or a missing capacitor there to save a few bucks, because the factory sees it as overengineering, but doesn't understand the purpose it's built for.
That said, relying on an older processor may actually not save money. Sure, there's a premium on the absolute newest processor, but in general what's cheapest is what is most mass produced Right Now(tm).
I think a z80 on something like this was likely similar to the reasons that NASA control systems typically use the most reliable hardware they can, which means something that has been in use for many years.
For HVAC, maybe a little of each, but also the software may have been written to the z80, and if you change that out, you have to do all the testing you'd have to do if you built a new machine.
I often think back on this old chat I had with my grandfather, where he kind of tilted his head at something I was explaining about 90s tech and said something like:
"Interesting. In my day, we programmed the software to the hardware, it kind of seems like now you all are programming the hardware to the software."
> I had a coworker whose brother is on the iPhone hardware team and they have a lot of trouble with samples coming back from manufacturing with the wrong resistor here or a missing capacitor there to save a few bucks, because the factory sees it as overengineering, but doesn't understand the purpose it's built for.
I find that story utterly implausible.
The day Foxconn makes unapproved changes to Apple designs is the day that...well, never.
Can't go this far though :
In my experience, actually doing things this way leads to less economic success for the product and eventually it gets outsold by a competitor without those restraints. And At FreeGate I told sales people "you have to sell what we have, not what we don't have" and still had them come back with complaints about how the competitor could install their box in a data center etc etc. Not a productive conversation (or fun for that matter).There does seem to be a minimally required feature set for selling things these days. "High Quality" isn't the compelling feature it once was.