$700 Rechargeable Battery Pack Contains $30 Worth Of Batteries

Sad as it is, this type of practice is actually fairly common in that industry. They do it with storage too, little flash based cards that are essentially SSD's but they charge thousands of dollars for what should cost hundreds. Check out the storage for the RED for example. The MiniMag is $850 for a 120GB version, and $3,900 for 1TB! The bigger REDMAG is $1,450 for 240GB!
 
The rabbit hole goes a lot further then that. The battery that you commonly find in most bulky device is known as a 18650 battery. They're cheap, and can come with tabs for soldering. BTW, buy the ones with tabs for soldering. You'll thank me.

I have an old Pentium 4 Clevo laptop from 15 years ago that I decided to resurrect. The battery was of course shot, and costed far too much to replace. But, most laptop batteries consist of 18650 batteries, so I just bought a bunch on Ebay for cheap and did some soldering and sure enough I have a new and improved battery. Cost me a pack of cigarettes to do the repair.

Modern laptops wouldn't use these 18650's but instead use the new flat type battery style like you find in phones. But you'll find a number of devices use 18650's, including even portable drills. Yep, I fixed them as well by swapping out the pack. The problem with this type of repair is that the battery pack is usually totally sealed, which requires you to take a knife and cut the thing open, very carefully. Then you have to seal it up, which I just use a hot soldering iron to melt the plastic sealed as best as I can.

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Well lets see, this is one cell off of a ryobi slim li-ion pack, and the ryobi pack has a nicer charing circuit with cell checks etc. They are $59.95 a 2-pack. Just wow...
 
So how does Nagra respond to this? Is it, "Ah crap, they're on to us!" Or do they attempt to fluff up their QC and charging circuitry as justification?
 
spugm1r3 said:
So how does Nagra respond to this? Is it, "Ah crap, they're on to us!" Or do they attempt to fluff up their QC and charging circuitry as justification?
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Nah. They'll either completely ignore it or post your typical corporate copy/pasta response of "We take the satisfaction of our valued customers and the quality of the products we sell very seriously and will be looking into this matter thoroughly."
 
I saw a video a few years ago where they opened a supposedly high end BD player that cost somewhere around 2G and all it was was a $500.00 Oppo brand BD player inside their fancy case with their name on it. Scumbags.
 
DukenukemX said:
The rabbit hole goes a lot further then that. The battery that you commonly find in most bulky device is known as a 18650 battery. They're cheap, and can come with tabs for soldering. BTW, buy the ones with tabs for soldering. You'll thank me.

I have an old Pentium 4 Clevo laptop from 15 years ago that I decided to resurrect. The battery was of course shot, and costed far too much to replace. But, most laptop batteries consist of 18650 batteries, so I just bought a bunch on Ebay for cheap and did some soldering and sure enough I have a new and improved battery. Cost me a pack of cigarettes to do the repair.

Modern laptops wouldn't use these 18650's but instead use the new flat type battery style like you find in phones. But you'll find a number of devices use 18650's, including even portable drills. Yep, I fixed them as well by swapping out the pack. The problem with this type of repair is that the battery pack is usually totally sealed, which requires you to take a knife and cut the thing open, very carefully. Then you have to seal it up, which I just use a hot soldering iron to melt the plastic sealed as best as I can.
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Think again my brand new laptop uses them and it is a non removable pack it looks to hold 3 in series... Where they put it they had room to put 6 of them or could have put a much much denser custom pack like the Mac books and some ultra books but 98% of laptops still use these things...
 
The really bad part is when the battery pack has some DRM on it and will not work once you replace the cells.

I also agree with the above if you do something like this buy the batteries with the solder tabs. It makes it go a lot faster.
 
That's nothing. In my test lab at work, I have dozens of old LSI/Engenio raid arrays that have BBUs that need to be changed every 2 years according to the manufacturer specs. (They can usually go 5-6 years if we just reset the expiration date on them, but that runs the rick of having no BBU power if the power goes out. Not a big deal in a test lab, though.) They have two of these generic 3.7V, 2600mAh batteries as shown above attached to a circuit board. LSI charged $385 each for them, at wholesale prices, back when they owned Engenio. After NetApp bought Engenio from LSI, they drove the price up to $622 each. We went with buying the generic battery replacements and soldering them on ourselves. I have 16 spares now, at a cost of less than $10 each.
 
extide said:
Sad as it is, this type of practice is actually fairly common in that industry. They do it with storage too, little flash based cards that are essentially SSD's but they charge thousands of dollars for what should cost hundreds. Check out the storage for the RED for example. The MiniMag is $850 for a 120GB version, and $3,900 for 1TB! The bigger REDMAG is $1,450 for 240GB!
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That's mostly because they use SLC memory for that purpose, and SLC memory costs a bit more to produce. In addition, because it is less cost effective than MLC, it gets used less, and that drives up the cost of production even more. (You'd think that lower demand would decrease the cost at a constant supply, but a lot of the IT hardware industry works the opposite of normal economics.) SLC is more reliable and more durable, but overall about ten times the cost.
 
dgingeri said:
That's mostly because they use SLC memory for that purpose, and SLC memory costs a bit more to produce. In addition, because it is less cost effective than MLC, it gets used less, and that drives up the cost of production even more. (You'd think that lower demand would decrease the cost at a constant supply, but a lot of the IT hardware industry works the opposite of normal economics.) SLC is more reliable and more durable, but overall about ten times the cost.
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Are you sure they use SLC? If so .. well then I can see those prices being a bit more .. reasonable, BUT, there is no reason that they can't use MLC. When you can buy a 512GB MLC drive for $300 than can write at over 2GB a second, it's hard to say that they NEED SLC. I mean, for their use, random access isn't important, it's all sequential, so it's not like this is a difficult workload. I am not exactly sure what kind of write speeds those red cards can do, but I would be surprised if it was much more than even 1GB a sec.

In any case, it still is a common general trend in that industry. It doesnt NEED to cost that much.
 
Audio industry ... 256MB flash upgrades are like thousands of dollars for digital pianos, etc. Their design cycles are so slow and long, by the time new stuff hits the market, they are technologically way behind.
 
These kinds of teardowns are misleading. So many people think material costs are the only factor.

The batteries are a finished product and can be bought. But the case and the electronics within all had to be designed, layed out and manufactured. It costs money to hire someone to do all that. And then they have to figure out how to amortize the cost over how many units they expect to sell.

If you look at the video you will see that its £498, but that includes VAT tax, it is £415 before VAT tax. The retailer gets some of that. Could be 20%, could be 30%, whatever. So at 20% we are now down to £332 for what the company is making off of it. Also consider that companies will use profits from one product to help offset another product or some other aspect of the companies operations.

Have any of you ever looked at trying to sell something as a hobby on the side and realized by the time you made it worth YOUR time, the price is too high to be marketable?

The guy should be complaining that the English government is getting £83 just because. 20% tax.
 
rezerekted said:
I saw a video a few years ago where they opened a supposedly high end BD player that cost somewhere around 2G and all it was was a $500.00 Oppo brand BD player inside their fancy case with their name on it. Scumbags.
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That was a Lexicon player if I remember correctly. That type of rebadging happens often, that being said some companies rebadge but also upgrade components. I believe Wolf Cinema rebadged a JVC projector but the upgrade components offered noticeable improvement.
 
extide said:
Are you sure they use SLC? If so .. well then I can see those prices being a bit more .. reasonable, BUT, there is no reason that they can't use MLC. When you can buy a 512GB MLC drive for $300 than can write at over 2GB a second, it's hard to say that they NEED SLC. I mean, for their use, random access isn't important, it's all sequential, so it's not like this is a difficult workload. I am not exactly sure what kind of write speeds those red cards can do, but I would be surprised if it was much more than even 1GB a sec.

In any case, it still is a common general trend in that industry. It doesnt NEED to cost that much.
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Well that and SLC memory is actually the same as MLC memory, you just get less capacity and you write to one voltage level rather than multiple, which is a setting on the controller. That's Samsung / etc's little stupid markup trick. That's why lots of new SSD controllers switch SLC mode so it can write quickly then later re-read the data and write it slowly in MLC mode. SLC isn't THAT much more than MLC memory but it's another price segmentation scam. Ok it's not a scam, they have to make enough money to justify producing something in low volume, but i'm sure Sanyo only spends $.20 to make the $1.30 battery too, then VAT taxes mark it up to one pound 30 pence (50% more) so in the end everyone takes their little pound of flesh.

Does it need SLC? That's hard to say, writing to SLC is much faster, you only have two logic levels so you can really juice it during writes and you'll still have very high S/N ratio. Once you go MLC/TLC, you have to write slowly since you can't overshoot into another logic level and with continuous shooting, there's no time to perform Garbage Collection (Copy back to MLC/TLC mode) if your controller / flash is just fast enough for the job due to limited channels. You also get more write endurance and need lower ECC since your S/N ratio is the entire voltage gap versus the approx 1/4 and 1/8 size bands for MLC/TLC so in a way it's not a bad design from using a less complicated controller, and lower quality flash.
 
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Reminds me of a very common (yet really pricey for what it is) button/watch battery. Yet there's a particular oddball size of Energizer battery that literally is just 8 of those button batteries inside, just un-peel, and one of these batteries is easily less than half the cost of a button battery
 
This is outrageous!

It's held together by $3 worth of screws!!!


But seriously, this is a battery for a $10,000 audio recorder. The users of this equipment are concerned with results not nickles and dimes.
 
westrock2000 said:
These kinds of teardowns are misleading. So many people think material costs are the only factor.

The batteries are a finished product and can be bought. But the case and the electronics within all had to be designed, layed out and manufactured. It costs money to hire someone to do all that. And then they have to figure out how to amortize the cost over how many units they expect to sell.

If you look at the video you will see that its £498, but that includes VAT tax, it is £415 before VAT tax. The retailer gets some of that. Could be 20%, could be 30%, whatever. So at 20% we are now down to £332 for what the company is making off of it. Also consider that companies will use profits from one product to help offset another product or some other aspect of the companies operations.

Have any of you ever looked at trying to sell something as a hobby on the side and realized by the time you made it worth YOUR time, the price is too high to be marketable?

The guy should be complaining that the English government is getting £83 just because. 20% tax.
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Well of course it costs more than just the BOM cost to make a product, but selling it for ~$700 is completely a rip-off. I mean since it's a specialized device I could see them charging $200-300 or so, which is still WAY overpriced, but hey it's probably a small volume and stuff. Yeah every device needs to be designed and stuff, BUT even including all of that, the price is still WAY overpriced!

Miikun said:
Well that and SLC memory is actually the same as MLC memory, you just get less capacity and you write to one voltage level rather than multiple, which is a setting on the controller. That's Samsung / etc's little stupid markup trick. That's why lots of new SSD controllers switch SLC mode so it can write quickly then later re-read the data and write it slowly in MLC mode. SLC isn't THAT much more than MLC memory but it's another price segmentation scam. Ok it's not a scam, they have to make enough money to justify producing something in low volume, but i'm sure Sanyo only spends $.20 to make the $1.30 battery too, then VAT taxes mark it up to one pound 30 pence (50% more) so in the end everyone takes their little pound of flesh.

Does it need SLC? That's hard to say, writing to SLC is much faster, you only have two logic levels so you can really juice it during writes and you'll still have very high S/N ratio. Once you go MLC/TLC, you have to write slowly since you can't overshoot into another logic level and with continuous shooting, there's no time to perform Garbage Collection (Copy back to MLC/TLC mode) if your controller / flash is just fast enough for the job due to limited channels. You also get more write endurance and need lower ECC since your S/N ratio is the entire voltage gap versus the approx 1/4 and 1/8 size bands for MLC/TLC so in a way it's not a bad design from using a less complicated controller, and lower quality flash.
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Yeah, of course, that's all standard stuff.

However, when I say does it NEED SLC, I mean, "Is MLC just simply not fast enough, or does it have some other physical limitation making it unuseable?" NO. As another user posted above, they are actually using SATA, so that limits the max b/w. There are tons of MLC SSD's on the market right now that can max out SATA3 in sequential reads and writes already. So yeah basically it's a shit ton of added markup.
 
swimming pool said:
This is outrageous!

It's held together by $3 worth of screws!!!


But seriously, this is a battery for a $10,000 audio recorder. The users of this equipment are concerned with results not nickles and dimes.
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Well the owner must have been somewhat cash conscious or he would have bought the 700 pound battery with 3x the cells. I think we're all used to massive markups based on material/costs. $2000 handbag? You can get a bespoke version made in Thailand for 1/10 the price without the burberry tartan to your specifications. Buy a CD for $10? Material costs < $0.10. Go to a fine dining restaurant? Food has at least a 300% markup. In all these cases, we pay for design/craftsmanship to bridge the cost gap. But this battery doesn't quite have the aesthetics or hardware to justify the markup. They could have built the entire case out of aluminum to heat sink all the cells, or had a led readout for battery life (so you can read the charge without plugging into your recorder), or a million small touches to give it a sense of quality but it was quite disappointing.
 
extide said:
Well of course it costs more than just the BOM cost to make a product, but selling it for ~$700 is completely a rip-off. I mean since it's a specialized device I could see them charging $200-300 or so, which is still WAY overpriced, but hey it's probably a small volume and stuff. Yeah every device needs to be designed and stuff, BUT even including all of that, the price is still WAY overpriced!



Yeah, of course, that's all standard stuff.

However, when I say does it NEED SLC, I mean, "Is MLC just simply not fast enough, or does it have some other physical limitation making it unuseable?" NO. As another user posted above, they are actually using SATA, so that limits the max b/w. There are tons of MLC SSD's on the market right now that can max out SATA3 in sequential reads and writes already. So yeah basically it's a shit ton of added markup.
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Probably, but they could be buying the cheapest off brand chinese flash (like the stuff they use for those cheap USB drives) and if you pair that with an SLC write algorithm plus a specialty market (= dirt cheap) controller you can do the job better for less money. Nothing wrong with that if you know you only need to write at 30MB/s or whatever the recorder is specced at. Then using SATA means if that production channel is ever gone, you can switch back to more expensive higher performance off the shelf products once the price/performance ratio meets up. You see lots of electronics that go through multiple revs, sometimes to take advantage of a bulk order of a certain component, then they'll switch suppliers as soon as they run out of inventory. As long as it meets the spec.
 
Miikun said:
Well the owner must have been somewhat cash conscious or he would have bought the 700 pound battery with 3x the cells. I think we're all used to massive markups based on material/costs. $2000 handbag? You can get a bespoke version made in Thailand for 1/10 the price without the burberry tartan to your specifications. Buy a CD for $10? Material costs < $0.10. Go to a fine dining restaurant? Food has at least a 300% markup. In all these cases, we pay for design/craftsmanship to bridge the cost gap. But this battery doesn't quite have the aesthetics or hardware to justify the markup. They could have built the entire case out of aluminum to heat sink all the cells, or had a led readout for battery life (so you can read the charge without plugging into your recorder), or a million small touches to give it a sense of quality but it was quite disappointing.
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It's a portable recorder. You might buy the smaller battery because it weighs less, not because it's cheaper. It's also a device recognized around the world as one of the best at what it does. The reputation associated the name alone justifies the price.
 
swimming pool said:
It's a portable recorder. You might buy the smaller battery because it weighs less, not because it's cheaper. It's also a device recognized around the world as one of the best at what it does. The reputation associated the name alone justifies the price.
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True, though you'd think they could at least have laid out the 6 batteries flat, which would have made the pack half the thickness, reduced the plastic used in the side (lighter), and made it smaller to boot so you can stuff a couple extra in your backpack. I haven't ever seen a laptop 6 cell extended battery in the same plastic case as the 3 cell standard battery either. Nor for camcorders batteries. Or my old portable DV recorders. Or out portable HDMI recorders we used at work. Smells blatantly cheap to me. It's good that they have a reputation making good gear. But it's equally important that they are exposed for cheaping out where it matters. If a Chinese knockoff firm made a compatible battery, it would have been smaller and frankly roughly the same quality for $100. It's not like there's a lot of R&D associated with the design of that box.
 
>Give my mom who can't get out of bed my old laptop to use
>Its slow of course, its over 5 years old
>"God this is so slow, and we don't have $600-700 for a fast laptop"
>Go out and buy a $70 SSD, stick it in
>Only PC's in the house that boot/run faster are my own

If you know who to talk to/where to look, you can often improve things yourself far cheaper than going "Official" routes
 
The middle cells are bad or he has the polarity wrong? Looks like the latter to me.....
 
At the risk of sounding like a dick, this shit should be obvious from the label. Here, I screen capped it from the video:

S81vZQZ.png


Without even watching the video (I paused it at that point while writing this) most Lithium ion rechargeable cells are 3.6-3.7 nominal voltage. 3*3.6 = 10.8, which is the voltage. Common 18650 cells range from ~2400 to 3400 mAh. My guess is it's a set of 6 18650 cells in a 3 series, 2 parallel configuration.

EDIT: Yup, called it...
 
PurduEE said:
The middle cells are bad or he has the polarity wrong? Looks like the latter to me.....
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Doesn't matter on the meter as to the polarity. If he had it backwards and the cells were good, it would have shown a negative voltage not a super low positive voltage.
 
swimming pool said:
The reputation associated the name alone justifies the price.
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I have to respectfully disagree. It's that kind of thinking that leads to companies pulling this kind of shit. I don't care how legendary someone's products are; nobody's name is worth 1000%+ markup in my book. Premium price for a high quality product that is well supported? OK fine, mark it up a bit. Straight up gouging the hell out of your customers because they trust your rep? Screw these guys.
 
jthomas said:
I have to respectfully disagree. It's that kind of thinking that leads to companies pulling this kind of shit. I don't care how legendary someone's products are; nobody's name is worth 1000%+ markup in my book. Premium price for a high quality product that is well supported? OK fine, mark it up a bit. Straight up gouging the hell out of your customers because they trust your rep? Screw these guys.
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I'm with you on this. Another area that you see this "snake oil" bullshit is other audio equipment. I've seen amplifiers that cost as much as a house - but honestly, they didn't sound any better to me than a good "middle of the road" amplifier, and with the numbers these guys are claiming you would need a damn oscilloscope to see the difference. Anyone who says they can hear a 0.005% decrease in THD is straight up full of SHIT (that decrease also comes with a MASSIVE premium...)

This is why I'm going into the field that I am (EE with a strong focus on micro electronics) because there are a lot of things that I could build for myself at a fraction of the price and they will be of WAY better quality. Not only that, but when someone's shit breaks I can fix it for a "nominal fee." :)
 
Miikun said:
Well that and SLC memory is actually the same as MLC memory, you just get less capacity and you write to one voltage level rather than multiple, which is a setting on the controller. That's Samsung / etc's little stupid markup trick. That's why lots of new SSD controllers switch SLC mode so it can write quickly then later re-read the data and write it slowly in MLC mode. SLC isn't THAT much more than MLC memory but it's another price segmentation scam. Ok it's not a scam, they have to make enough money to justify producing something in low volume, but i'm sure Sanyo only spends $.20 to make the $1.30 battery too, then VAT taxes mark it up to one pound 30 pence (50% more) so in the end everyone takes their little pound of flesh.

Does it need SLC? That's hard to say, writing to SLC is much faster, you only have two logic levels so you can really juice it during writes and you'll still have very high S/N ratio. Once you go MLC/TLC, you have to write slowly since you can't overshoot into another logic level and with continuous shooting, there's no time to perform Garbage Collection (Copy back to MLC/TLC mode) if your controller / flash is just fast enough for the job due to limited channels. You also get more write endurance and need lower ECC since your S/N ratio is the entire voltage gap versus the approx 1/4 and 1/8 size bands for MLC/TLC so in a way it's not a bad design from using a less complicated controller, and lower quality flash.
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MLC is not the same as SLC. Even if you just use one bit per cell in an MLC flash chip, it still has far fewer write cycles than true SLC memory. SLC typically has ten times the write cycles of an equal process MLC chip. So, you'd have to buy ten times as much MLC flash memory and configure it as spare to get equal durability as an SLC flash chip. The speed doesn't matter so much. It's all about durability in server level stuff.
 
Happens a lot. I remember a hi-fi firm were selling a mains filter for £350. Looked really familiar to me and the specs were the same. Basically it was a Farnell IEC plug mains filter that cost £20. They just slapped a label on it and charged an extra £330.00.

I mentioned this on a lot of the reviews at the time and amazingly they stopped selling it soon after.

If you rip open that $2000 DVD/CD player you'll find a $20 PC DVD drive at the centre surrounded by $150 worth of electronics.

That $500 a meter speaker cable? Was probably designed/specced originally by Boeing or made to go in CAT scanners and costs 0.05c a meter from China. Making cable is big dirty industrial work where a cable is only viable to make in tens of Km at a time and those Hi-Fi companies don't have smelting works etc. in their backlot.

Oh yeah and the Grado headphone amp that costs $350 with $3.50 worth of parts in a wooden box.

Basically people will pay. That's how it works. If you don't like it then don't buy it. However, there is a lack of respect for the customer when mark up gets to ridiculous levels.
 
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STrooperTK421 said:
I'm with you on this. Another area that you see this "snake oil" bullshit is other audio equipment. I've seen amplifiers that cost as much as a house - but honestly, they didn't sound any better to me than a good "middle of the road" amplifier, and with the numbers these guys are claiming you would need a damn oscilloscope to see the difference. Anyone who says they can hear a 0.005% decrease in THD is straight up full of SHIT (that decrease also comes with a MASSIVE premium...)

This is why I'm going into the field that I am (EE with a strong focus on micro electronics) because there are a lot of things that I could build for myself at a fraction of the price and they will be of WAY better quality. Not only that, but when someone's shit breaks I can fix it for a "nominal fee." :)
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Funny enough an oscilloscope is something they never use in the hi-fi world. Its part of the game: if you believe its better you will hear it, and if you don't hear it... well, you aren't a golden ear.

The hi-fi world is completely fucked up this days. You should thing that people would blind-test equipment before parting with their hard earned $$$. But nope. They accept whatever bullshit they are told, to the point that they lose all rationale instincts. A 2m mains cable that makes your system sound so much better whilst ignoring the rest of the shitty grounding and cabling you have on the house? The $1000 HDMI cable that magically makes the sound feel "purer"? How come if we use it for the BRAY, on the TV there is no visible difference? Mmmmmm...

----

Heck, I'm in the high-end service industry. We are the most expensive there is in our industry, bar none. But at least we are honest about it, and we let our clients know that even though they are paying (in the tens or hundreds of thousands for their stays) top dollar, they do get top dollar. It doesn't matter if they want to look behind the carpets, everything is what is supposed to be. We do not pretend.

On the other hand, you pay a lot of money for stuff that, once you look inside, it isn't what you thought it was. I've always thought that if you would pay less for a product once you know what is inside then that products price is wrong, and so is the mark up. On the other hand, everybody understands that even when the product is the same, services attached to it (like warranty, or even how nice the staff at the shop is) make for an important factor. Not a 500% important factor, of course, but it is something else to consider.
 
jthomas said:
I have to respectfully disagree. It's that kind of thinking that leads to companies pulling this kind of shit. I don't care how legendary someone's products are; nobody's name is worth 1000%+ markup in my book. Premium price for a high quality product that is well supported? OK fine, mark it up a bit. Straight up gouging the hell out of your customers because they trust your rep? Screw these guys.
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There tends to be a gross underestimate of the costs involved in producing limited numbers of high quality equipment. Plus, the user market has determined that the sale price is appropriate. This isn't meant for the consumer market where price is a major factor, it's a market with $1K microphones, $10K recorders, $100K mixers in mix rooms that cost $1M to build, where results are all that matters.
 
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