Things cost a lot to produce. It’s cheapened by underpaying laborers and underestimating the cost and impact of resource extraction and power consumption, and the current path of massively scaling up factories, overproducing, and driving the repair economy out of business by making “just buy a new one!” so affordable really looks like The Big Thing That Ends The Current Epoch that people will really struggle to comprehend when they learn about it in history class

I don't know what exactly you're referring to but I assume you mean the bill of material cost that sometimes goes around in headlines like "new phone only costs $150 to produce and is sold for $500" or something like that.

That's a flawed way of looking at it because it ignores things like:

• Shipping cost (both the final product and individual components)
• Development cost
• The % the retail store takes
• ...

And of course profit which ideally is used to finance the development of the next device and ofc the greedy execs at the end who put the rest in their pockets (that's the only part which you can actually cut)

If you have economies of scale, and are competing on ground other than having the highest specs on paper, yes. If you're using the latest hardware and not moving Google volumes of devices though it's not as easy to keep prices down.

Now ask yourself, is that because Google isn't subsidizing device costs... Or perhaps..........