Janina, He gave you one. Assistive technology aims for a low quantity market. If there were milions of blind people pounding on the doors to buy this product, competition would pick up, prices would drop and market forces would determine the cost. This doesn't happen with assistive technology. The market is small, the prices must be set to allow the small customer base (which is businesses and rehab programs, NOT the end user) to cover research and development costs, marketing costs, business overhead and a profit. Yes, that ugly old P word. Much as some people gnash their teeth and raise their voices in fury, nonetheless profit is the only real market motivator that allows assistive hardware technology to be developed. There's a lot that goes into any commercial product. The fact that they use Linux probably helps keep the price down, but there are still software development costs, hardware development costs, packaging costs, marketing costs, administrative costs. This isn't Woz and Jobs in their garage selling a hand made gizmo that they packed into an aluminum hobby box they got from radio shack. It is a commercial product that required physical design, electrical design, UL Lab testing, FCC Class B RF emission certification, marketing support, administration support, engineering supprot and so forth and so on. All of it pricey. All of it having to be recovered from sales. And not very many sales at that. Computer prices have done down because they sell in the tens of millions, even hundreds of millions these days. This product is not going to sell a million. Rudy On Tue, Nov 13, 2001 at 04:23:48PM -0500, Janina Sajka wrote: > Tommy, wait a minute here, computers cost less today across the board. If > we believe what you say, that we get what we pay for, then they should be > poorer computers, not more powerful ones. This just isn't the case. > > So, why are computer prices coming down everywhere except assistive > technology, where they're going up? I understand about refreshable braille > displays. I don't understand at all about the rest of it. The > Papenmeier/Alva web page points out that much linux software is free or > low cost. So, are you guys packaging free software and charging more for > it? Please, this price needs an honest explanation. >