And that is domestic versus imported. In Shenzhen they do production of smaller quantities in 12 hours overnight for $30 extra with local express delivery.
I hung out with a friend of mine in Shenzen who does this stuff all the time (and is Chinese not that is super important other than the fact being fluent helps a ton).
Together we prototyped a product over a 2 month period, him handling the HW and EE bits and me writing the board firmware and HIL simulator/test-harness.
We would get some boards, he would find and correct any issues with the board, get a new file to the board house before 5pm and we would get new boards in the morning at 9am delivered by a motorbike courier for about $20 or something. As a software guy that seemed pretty insane to me.
All up we probably did about 6 or 7 HW revisions like that and a few of those probably could have been avoidable if more care was taken but why would we when it's so cheap to iterate so quickly?
Unfortunately for various reasons we didn't choose to continue the project but I learnt a hell of a lot and really enjoyed hanging in Shenzhen and getting to understand the hacker culture there a bit more. We burnt overall a pretty small amount of money to learn some important lessons that I think would have been much more expensive anywhere else in the world.
If you every write more about it, please post a link here in HN, I'm sure tons of people would be interested in more details about the what, why, how of what you were doing, and life in Shenzhen.
