This little thing, costing about $5 to make, is $775.
In fact inside is just one chip which is currently about $0.10
Sounds utterly ridiculous - there should be a law against that sort of thing.
What is it?
It is a configuration module for the King autopilots. The AP config is stored inside it, so you can unplug the AP and stick another one in, without having the reload the config.
Only a part of the config is stored in this thing, however. AFAIK the aircraft type specific stuff is e.g. how fast to drive the roll servo.
It is an EEPROM - probably a 93C46
Copy that. Understand EEPROM. The one in my tele threw a wobbly.
I was told that Beech spares go up in price the moment they go in the stockroom. The longer they stay on the shelf they get %'s added to them for tied-up capital and any other %'s month by month that the accountant can think of. An item gathering dust in the stockroom for several years gets month by month price increases which results in these huge prices when it eventually gets sold.
A lot of things are priced at levels with nothing to do with their cost of manufacture. How about software, downloaded from the internet, it costs the supplier exactly nothing to sell another copy....
Peter, I suppose you should start a competition and start pricing at $700 or less!
Actually what I had in mind was totally bombing out the entire world market for this device, by going in at $600
How about $7,000 for the TAWS software key on a GTN650!
Now that is silly pricing. I wonder if they have sold any.
Software keys are not unusual but they do create a perception of greed.
It is perfectly OK to screw a customer by any percentage, so long as he thinks he is getting value for money (I say that only partly tongue in cheek). But charging money to enable an option which is already there just makes it look like an obvious ripoff.
Sandel charge $1000 for a key for each of:
So you can spend $3k on top of the ~$9k (that's a US discount website price e.g. Sarasota Avionics) price of the SN3500 EHSI. But all the software is already in there.
How many people pay this? Probably not many. I think one makes more money by packing one's product with functionality and trashing the competition that way.