Why Are Ultrasound Machines So Expensive?
Few days ago we visited a company that makes avionics for small private planes. I looked at the hardware, a simple touch screen and tiny linux computer with usual sensor connections. I thought I could build this myself in a weekend for may be $300 tops which is an order of magnitude lower than their sell price. However what I learned was that the thing is expensive is not because hardware or software is expensive but the <i>QA</i> and <i>certification</i> process. There are regulations that avionics needs to work in all kind of weather at wide range of temperatures and pressures while still being accurate and have million hour of run time testing without any crashes and survive extreme shocks, vibrations and G-forces. Someone is after all betting their lives on your device. Now suddenly you have to care about strength of every soldering joint, specs of every transistor and reliability of every screw. Add on to this the customer support, marketing, warranties, legal expenses, returns and other typical overhead of production. If I&#x27;d to make device that is compliant of all these, it wouldn&#x27;t come cheap. Making a hobby device for demo to school kids is quite different than making device that would help people make life and death decisions.