Originally posted by reh321 I repeat the most important part of my previous post:
Most likely Pentax would have to completely redo all of their programming if they moved to another processor family; I don't know how much programming is involved, so I don't know how this would affect near-term development efforts {at one time there was a rule-of-thumb saying that a given developer would produce roughly 100 lines of debugged code per day}
I agree programming and maybe hardware chip design. This again a problem of fixed cost.
Maybe when you change hardware on the next gen phone as a manufacturer, you may have to redo lot of things. And maybe that mean you need say 200 persons working for 6 months doing that. So that 100 man year worth of work. The cost being about 10-20 millions dollard depending of your structure cost.
Now you are samsung and you sell 50 million unit a year. The cost is 20 to 40 cent per phone. Negligible.
You do the same, you are Pentax. Maybe you would not need 100 man years but 200 , because you don't have the same experience. Maybe samsung do it every year. That's business as usual. So the cost maybe 20-40 millons dollars to you.
If you do that for K1, you may sell say 300K unit over the life of the camera. The cost per unit is in the range of $60-120 instead of less than one dollar.
What more there only 30 persons in the company right now that could possibility do that. Maybe you could accept to hire 5 new persons and dedicate 3 person of the current team to help them. As the other have to implement actual new feature that would give sales than just doing a technical migration...
Remember a few year ago already apple explained they have a dedicated unit of about 1000 persons working only on their embedded camera for their smartphone. Not the factory. The persons working at apple. I am not sure whole Pentax is 1000 people.
Scale is really important. When you sell 100, 1000 time more, you can afford to spend 10,100 time more for R&D and find it cheap.