Mac software development costs

[flylow]

Over at http://www.escortradarforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2696 a gentleman claims it would add $200 to the price of Escort radar detectors to add Mac support.

supporting multiple operating systems adds tremendously to the production cost of the product, and that cost will be passed on to the consumer. Ready to pay a couple of hundred more?

I cannot see it, maybe a few dollars as Escort is not a huge company but $200 seems ridiculous to me. Any comments from knowledgeable Mac people?

 

[drescherjm]

How many of these things do they sell? Tens of thousands? Millions?

The problem probably is that they would have to hire a macintosh development team + rewrite all of the tech support documents + train their support staff to support macintosh.

Edit: When thinking about this more I think its not that it will add $200 to the cost of each device however its probably more of return on investment. I mean to add support it will likely cost 1 million to several million dollars US total. How many new sales do they expect to get by adding this support such that it will cover this cost?

 

[phide]

I've seen nothing to suggest that development costs of OS X applications are any higher/lower than the development costs of Windows applications. I might expect that the developers themselves may command a higher wage due to the niche-y nature of the platform, but would also expect a shorter development window due to the array of functionality already present in Cocoa that's fairly trivial to expose.

Given the nature of this particular application...no. Nowhere near $200 per unit to recoup unless they sell only a couple hundred of these things a year.

 

[Bomo]

How many of these things do they sell? Tens of thousands? Millions?

The problem probably is that they would have to hire a macintosh development team + rewrite all of the tech support documents + train their support staff to support macintosh.

Edit: When thinking about this more I think its not that it will add $200 to the cost of each device however its probably more of return on investment. I mean to add support it will likely cost 1 million to several million dollars US total. How many new sales do they expect to get by adding this support such that it will cover this cost?

This. If they're adding a completely new team, plus the support behind it, it's going to be costly. The number of added sales will most likely not cover the cost.

I think $200 is pretty extreme, but "a few dollars" is equally extreme. I'd imagine with the market size of the radar detectors, along with the already expected price (~$300-$500), an increase of probably $75 to $100 for a universal model would be expected. They're obviously not going to just pass the actual cost down to the consumer; a universal model would be more desirable, leading to more mark up. What maybe cost them $5-$15 per unit, is probably worth the extra $75 per unit to the buyer.

Further your title is slightly misleading when you look at your actual question. The cost of development is going to help determine what the cost to consumer is, but it will almost definitely not be the cost passed on to consumers, which is what you seem to be concerned with. Software development costs aren't that high. What is high is the added support, manufacturing, and testing.

 

[flylow]

I could not find any stats on the number of units they sell yearly. Definitely not a huge company but from poking around some business info sites the supposed estimate seems to be they sell 20 to 30 million dollars worth of products per year, not sure if that included their Beltronics division. Cheapest detector lists at $300, most expensive (with laser jammers) is $1600. Their new combo radar detector/GPSr unit lists for $650. Escort products generally are not discounted plus it appears that they sell a large quantity directly to the consumer from their website. Their list of unauthorized sellers is quite large.

Always bothers me when people post misinformation in forums.

 

[flylow]

I was thinking of a few dollars as $10 to $20 as I posted over in the Escort forum.

I apologize for the misleading title. Since Escort constantly upgrades their products I did not think of additional costs for testing nor possible additional manufacturing costs. What title would you have chosen?