I understand where you are coming from. I have a love-hate relationship with patents. That said, I try not to pass judgement on such things until I fully understand the story (not saying you don't).
For example, if a technology took ten years and ten billion dollars to develop to the point of it being commercially viable, well, yeah, a patent-protected monopoly is likely the ethically correct privilege the inventors should be granted.
An example (out of many) of bullshit patents and monopolies that should have never been granted are the horseshit patents Color Kinetics got years ago. These people had the audacity to patent the use of pulse-width-modulation to control the intensity of LEDs and make lights that could produce different colors. The patent office granted these people patent after patent. Once they had enough they started to attack the entire LED industry. Philips ended-up acquiring them. They let the industry know they would not enforce the bullshit patents. Still, the crooks took their thievery all the way to the bank.
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As for the relative cost of LCD's vs. E-ink. I think the primary difference is very simple: Volume. I haven't done the numbers, but I think I can say that the LCD industry is at least 1,000 times larger in volume. It's like the LCD vs. OLED comparison. Volume is king.
Another element is the tooling-up for manufacturing. A modern LCD manufacturing plant runs in the billions. Two billion dollars the last time I checked, but I haven't been in the industry for ten years and have lost touch. You are not going to take a multi-billion-dollar factory and slice-off a corner to make e-ink displays. These factories are highly automated and tuned machines. They are designed to make millions of displays per month.
This means that making e-ink displays requires putting-up a specialized factory or retooling an old LCD factory that might no-longer be competitive for making LCD's. Regardless of the approach, this is likely to be a very expensive undertaking. That, coupled with lower volume, is guaranteed to translate into higher prices.
Disclaimer: I was in the high performance display business for ten years. Exited a decade ago. So, yeah, I am a little disconnected as to the latest and greatest and what might be new in manufacturing. That said, I get the sense that material changes haven't been as significant in the last ten years as they were during the prior ten.
> This means that making e-ink displays requires putting-up a specialized factory or retooling an old LCD factory that might no-longer be competitive for making LCD's. Regardless of the approach, this is likely to be a very expensive undertaking. That, coupled with lower volume, is guaranteed to translate into higher prices.
I think your observation is much more accurate than the other speculations about patents I have seen.
Well, there's probably truth to the intellectual property factor as well. The business equation is a complex multivariate problem with a long list of variables. Each and every one of them contributes in one way or another. For the last 12 months we've been learning about this new "pandemic" variable, whose coefficient went from 0 to 1 in an instant.
I see people often simplify businesses along high contrast dividing lines: big/small, greedy/not greedy, green/dirty, startup/lifestyle, etc.
Anyone who simplifies businesses along any line on a monochromatic plane has never run enough of a business to fully understand just how complex things can be. They grab one variable (minimum wage, taxes, regulations, oil, etc.) and think it can be manipulated without it affecting the aforementioned multivariate equation.
A sad example of this just took place a few weeks ago in California. I think it was in San Diego that the politicians decided grocery workers had to have a $4 per hour "hero" raise due to working through COVID. While everyone could agree that there are people who made sacrifices for the rest of us, as I learned to say, some problems don't pass math and physics. the end result was that the Kroger company, which owns Ralphs and a bunch of other brands, closed four stores (maybe 2, don't remember) because there was no way they could keep the doors open if they paid everyone an extra $4 per hour. So, a forced wage raise actually destroyed jobs --and this happened nearly instantly-- and people who had work found themselves on the street.
It was Long Beach, not San Diego, and the situation is, as you say, not that simple. Kroger has talked about closing those two "underperforming" stores many times before. Kroger is a huge company that had record sales (over $100B) and record profits last year, so it seems unlikely they couldn't afford to absorb a temporary (the ordinance limited the extra pay to 120 days) rise in labor cost of 20-28% at two stores. More likely, Kroger is taking the opportunity to close two long-struggling stores while -- most importantly -- setting an example, i.e., sending a message to other jurisdictions which might entertain the idea of mandating higher wages that Kroger is perfectly willing to punish workers and customers if it comes to that. (Also, the stores didn't close immediately, they're scheduled to close April 17.)
Yeah, nothing is simple. My guess is that the stores were borderline in terms of viability and the $4/hr hike put them over the edge.
Still, it sucks that people lost their jobs this way. We need a system where politicians suffer real consequences for their actions. Not sure what this would look like, but it sounds good.
What we don't know is if the $4/hr hike caused employers to have to reduce worker hours, shift people to part-time basis, etc. Maybe that information will come out at some point.
Imagine a situation where you have 50 people making $12 per hour and you face an instant increase in labor costs to $16 per hour, or 33%.
That means the store has to INSTANTLY generate at least 33% more in profits (not sales, profits) in order to cover that increase. I don't know any business that can simply will a 33% increase in performance. This is where political thinking quickly becomes delusional. And, no, they are not sitting on fat margins that would allow absorbing such a thing.
For example, if a technology took ten years and ten billion dollars to develop to the point of it being commercially viable, well, yeah, a patent-protected monopoly is likely the ethically correct privilege the inventors should be granted.
An example (out of many) of bullshit patents and monopolies that should have never been granted are the horseshit patents Color Kinetics got years ago. These people had the audacity to patent the use of pulse-width-modulation to control the intensity of LEDs and make lights that could produce different colors. The patent office granted these people patent after patent. Once they had enough they started to attack the entire LED industry. Philips ended-up acquiring them. They let the industry know they would not enforce the bullshit patents. Still, the crooks took their thievery all the way to the bank.
-----
As for the relative cost of LCD's vs. E-ink. I think the primary difference is very simple: Volume. I haven't done the numbers, but I think I can say that the LCD industry is at least 1,000 times larger in volume. It's like the LCD vs. OLED comparison. Volume is king.
Another element is the tooling-up for manufacturing. A modern LCD manufacturing plant runs in the billions. Two billion dollars the last time I checked, but I haven't been in the industry for ten years and have lost touch. You are not going to take a multi-billion-dollar factory and slice-off a corner to make e-ink displays. These factories are highly automated and tuned machines. They are designed to make millions of displays per month.
This means that making e-ink displays requires putting-up a specialized factory or retooling an old LCD factory that might no-longer be competitive for making LCD's. Regardless of the approach, this is likely to be a very expensive undertaking. That, coupled with lower volume, is guaranteed to translate into higher prices.
Disclaimer: I was in the high performance display business for ten years. Exited a decade ago. So, yeah, I am a little disconnected as to the latest and greatest and what might be new in manufacturing. That said, I get the sense that material changes haven't been as significant in the last ten years as they were during the prior ten.