RonR
Contributor
This is a reasonable question. As someone who has developed and designed a dive computer in current production, Cobalt Guide: Home, and who is familiar with the economics of manufacturing and delivering them, (and who's diving experience goes back to long before the first dive computers) I can give you an informed answer.
It's not because manufacturers or retailers are making huge profits. The market is pretty good at driving down costs if it is possible to do so. I know personally that we tried to keep the Cobalt's cost as low cost as we possibly could, and if there were any way to bring the cost down without compromising design or quality, we would do it in a heartbeat. I spend a good bit of my time trying to work on ways to make things more economical. We would love to be more competitive. Nobody doing this is getting rich-far from it. It's a very risky business.
It's not because of liability insurance- that is a cost factor, but relatively speaking a minor one, a few percent, and it applies to all dive gear (and other sports equipment).
The need for a waterproof enclosure that will stand up to abuse pushes up cost compared to consumer electronics, but again, it's not the big factor.
What does make dive computers relatively more expensive can be summed up in one word: volume.
Most divers have no sense of how tiny the diving market is. If one dive computer were able to capture 100% of the market, it would still be an infinitesimally tiny blip- utterly invisible- in the consumer electronics world. Anything you see in a mass market retailer is being sold at volumes that dwarf the biggest selling products in diving. The unit cost to manufacture consumer electronics is therefore much, much less. Consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers can operate off far thinner profit margins than diving (ask your LDS if they could keep the doors open on a 5-15% markup) because they can have volumes in the hundreds of thousands or millions.
To illustrate how this alters the landscape consider our need to purchase color displays for our state of the art dive computer. The premier supplier of AMOLED displays, used in some cell phones and other devices as well as the Cobalt, and almost the ONLY supplier in current production, does not use distributors and will not consider selling to you unless you can guarantee purchases of 200,000 per month- we tried. Apple sold something like 30 million iPhones in just the first quarter of 2012. That's about the range where consumer electronics become inexpensive. Based on pretty decent industry knowledge, the total number of dive computers sold annually worldwide by all manufacturers is considerably less than several hundred thousand. The fact is that most newly certified divers drop the sport after a few years at best, or dive only occasionally. No one knows how many actual "new diver" certifications (as opposed to specialty, included in PADI statistics) are given out every year, but the 200,000 range is a a not unreasonable estimate. A minority of those buy equipment. A smaller minority buy computers, and those mostly at the low price end. Most gear sales (all kinds) are to new divers. As to how many divers there are in the world, nobody knows. Undercurrent surveyed the available information a few years back, and you can look at it here: How Many Divers Are There? : Undercurrent 05/2007
Manufacturers of dive computers pay higher prices for components. They pay more for assembly. They don't have the ongoing service plans that subsidize cellphone purchases. They must amortize significant development costs and tooling costs over a very small number of sales. If it were possible for a company to make dive computers for less it would be happening- it's a competitive world. Some low end pucks with segment based displays probably carry good margins to the manufacturer after years of production and amortizing costs. But developing new computer designs, using new sensor technologies, new microprocessors, and new displays/ user interfaces is expensive and difficult, there is no guarantee of success.
Speaking as someone who has worked on both consumer product and dive computer product design, dive computers are more demanding and complex to develop- by a big margin. They are not anything like wristwatches (or GPS units, or phones, or game players ) in terms of what they need to do. The firmware must handle complex tasks in real time and give correct information to a diver who may do unexpected things. They have to do it underwater. There are multiple sensor inputs that must be prioritized and managed. Implementing a decompression algorithm as part of a real-time system is far more difficult than implementing it in a desktop software package. It would be very easy to underestimate the complexity of developing a dive computer, even for experienced embedded systems designers. Support is also a major issue. Complex products built for small markets just end up either being expensive or not existing at all.
Ron
---------- Post added April 13th, 2013 at 01:20 PM ----------
As to the technology not changing- perhaps there is some stasis at the low end, though I think even there products are getting more capable. But, using just the Cobalt as an example, we have a highly visible color display, rechargeable batteries that last a long time, an easy to understand, menu driven interface, a built in digital 360° compass with multiple bearing memory, a dive log that will store and graphically display about 600 hours of detailed diving information, multi-gas and gas switching capability, no-stop times displayed as a list with a calculator planning function, an onboard dive planner that, using your current tissue state, has graphic planning capability comparable to desktop planners, including gas requirements planing, and up-dateable firmware. Not everyone needs or wants those kinds of features, but most would not have been available anywhere a few years back. And we are working hard on improvements, including the most important one, in my view, ease of use.
Ron
