I actually work for a software company going on 8 years.
You are working in IT for 8 years and you still don't know that you pay for the software R&D and not the hardware?
Are you the intern that makes the coffee?
Besides, your "calculation" is wrong anyway. The DSPs alone cost 1/5th to 1/4th of the purchase price of an AX8 or ane FX II for that matter. Include chassis, mainboard and quality periphery and you are at least at 1/3th the selling price already in pure hardware components (for the AX8 at least... I'd say the FX II has a higher margin, but that's to be expected from something that stems from the "early adopter" phase (and must therefore cover the R&D cost of new developed products like the AX8) and is also considered the top-end product of it's market segment.
At some point you reach a plateau where you are no longer researching anything new unless you are working on a new product.
At the point of feature saturation you can still always add new content (like new models) or optimize and refactor your code to free hardware resources. Guess what happened in the Quantum release? Right! The CPU usage went down.
But surely, as you work in a software company
you would know that.
With things like modelers the hardware is generally set in stone until someone finds a problem that cannot be hid by software. For example on the X3 Live there was an issue where they used copper paint as shielding a pieces of it were falling off onto the board where they were shorting out lines after weight was applied. Well they released a patch that would slow down the switch polling so the problem wasn't as obvious. It didn't fix the issue though. It was a nice try though. Its the same reason for the black screen of death.
And? If you think calling back products just to fix hardware issues that could be solved (or worked around) by a software update is a good business practice, then clearly you haven't visited any economics (or the right) classes in college.
There are alot of people that are interested in not just using products but understanding exactly what they are paying for and if they think they can get similar performance for cheaper they will not hesitate to do it. I see the AxeFX as a more mature product that is just one option in a host of many. If you really want to see who is into dick waving, find out how many are actually making money off of it versus buying it just to say they have one.
It is one option in a host of many. Not even the creator himself denies that (and besides: one of the coolest features of Fractal products is the fact that the creator himself comments on forum posts in sometimes brutal honesty). What sets the Axe apart from it's competitors is that it had a headstart of many years to improve the algorithms to the amount of quality we see today. Besides, supply and demand: Fractal has established a trustworthy reputation from the ground-up over the last decade. If people pay that much for their products, chances are the price is
just right. Let me guess: you own at least one Apple product?
But who am I talking to? You work in software developement after all...
R&D costs a lot of money. We're kind of living in a strange time where the customer demands a certain price point by looking at specs. F.ex. People are looking at smart phones and comparing megapixels and basing their decision on that number. Anyone who knows anything about cameras knows that the lens matters way more. Most people probably don't know that too much megapixels can add noise to your picture. Why is the knockoff GoPro camera quality so much worse than the real GoPro although the specs are the same? What I'm trying to get at is that if you think the hardware specs tell you what the product is then you're judging a book by it's cover. The hardware can give you an understanding of a products limitations but that's all.
