> 50-cent saving is a point of great pride to electrical engineers
As an engineer you are given a power budget, a thermal budget, a size budget, a weight budget and a monetary budget, among many other constraints. This means, like any engineering endeavor, there are tradeoffs to make. That 50-cents you saved on some power controller might be "spent" somewhere else that has a higher impact on the product.
There is a near infinite set of things you can do to make the product better somehow. Unfortunately you don't get to do them all. Many of the things conflict with eachother--more battery life might mean more weight and size that you have to "steal" from some other aspect of the product to balance out. Faster, better charging might cost 50-cents but that might mean in order to stay on budget you'd have to use a lower quality plastic shell that is more prone to damage. That faster, better charging might also eat into your thermal budget, meaning you'll need to spend more on cooling, weight and size.
As an engineer you are given a power budget, a thermal budget, a size budget, a weight budget and a monetary budget, among many other constraints. This means, like any engineering endeavor, there are tradeoffs to make. That 50-cents you saved on some power controller might be "spent" somewhere else that has a higher impact on the product.
There is a near infinite set of things you can do to make the product better somehow. Unfortunately you don't get to do them all. Many of the things conflict with eachother--more battery life might mean more weight and size that you have to "steal" from some other aspect of the product to balance out. Faster, better charging might cost 50-cents but that might mean in order to stay on budget you'd have to use a lower quality plastic shell that is more prone to damage. That faster, better charging might also eat into your thermal budget, meaning you'll need to spend more on cooling, weight and size.
It's all tradeoffs. There is no free lunch.