User:Bytesock/Commodore 64 cost

Manufacturing cost
Vertical integration was the key to keep costs low. At the introduction in 1982 the production cost was 135 USD and the retail price 595 USD. In 1985 the retail cost went down to 149 USD (circa USD today), and the production cost were believed to be somewhere between 35 - 50 USD (circa - USD today). Commodore would not confirm this cost figure. Dougherty of the Berkeley Softworks estimated the costs of the Commodore 64 parts based on his experience at Mattel and Imagic.

To lower costs TTL chips were replaced with less expensive custom chips and ways to to increase the yields on the sound and graphics chips were found. The video chip 6567 had the ceramic package replaced with plastic but heat dissipation demanded a redesign of the chip and the development of a plastic package that can dissipate heat as well as ceramic.

The Commodore 64 was a design by engineers when it became a success, marketing took over: "The design team was autonomous&mdash;they did their own market research, developed their own specifications, and took their baby right up through production. /../ and Commodore knew it had a winner, the corporate bureaucracy, /../ moved in.

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“If you let marketing get involved with product definition, you’ll never get it done quickly,” Yannes said. “And you squander the ability to make something unique, because marketing always wants a product compatible with something else.”

/../ “When you get many people involved in a project, all you end up doing is justifying yourself. I knew the Commodore 64 was technically as good and as low-cost as any product that could be made at the time, but now I had to listen to marketing people saying, ‘It won’t sell because it doesn’t have this, it can’t do that.’

“The freedom that allowed us to do the C-64 project will probably never exist again in that environment.”"