Agreed, there are literally people fab-ing chips (microfabrication) in their own houses in very small scale. Makerspaces are great for fun stuff like this.

If the cost keeps going higher, I will expect a lot of shops to pop up. More realistically, current companies might be shooting themselves in the foot in the long run as the rest of the world makes more repairable components and electronics. I know we just dismantled a couple of PCs 10+ years old and sold the RAM/Hardrives for profit.

Remember that the cost pretty much represents how many people you need to get to do something scarce the resources is and how high the demand is, majority of it comes down to wages licensing of intellectual property and patents in one part of the supply chain or another.

FTFY lol. I don't really know what the ratio is of parasitism and actual work is, and I assume it is almost unknowable currently. Things like securing access to some mind, then making sure through cartels or lobbying to drive up the price of resources to make more profit. Presumably ASML is guarding their secrets very much and massively profiting off of it.

I wonder if it's technically possible to grow electronics in a vat or tray using biological cells that have the entire schematic encoded into their DNA. Some kind of biology that can grow copper traces and organic semiconductors in a sugar soup. And then dies and leaves a PCB or integrated circuit behind. Maybe much slower but much larger chips where you can just fill some trays with activated goop and let them grow for a week into "compucilium".

Then you could design the DNA for such biomanufacturers and just sell it in ketchup packets for people to grow their own computers. Just add sugar and water and mix well lol. This would truly "democratize" electronics.

Youre quite close. Its very small switches that are doing it

Not sure if such a thing can exist but bio-computing is already a thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing

I sort of understand on an intellectual level, but I can't accept it emotionally. Billions of yes/no left/right stacked on top of each other turns in to a movie, or video game, or people bitching at each other online. I've seen some of the old 10kb video challenges and get that it's technically possible to do that... but at the same time I can't accept that anyone can actually do that.

Yeah I think the bioelectric computers still require "living hardware", I imagine something more like fungal mycelium growing in highly complex patterns and then drying out.

After digging a bit, microbes and fungi can create copper nanoparticles for something like conductive ink, but it's unclear if that could actually create solid traces instead of separate nanoparticles.

Insanely there is already research on Microbial synthesis of chalcogenide semiconductor nanoparticles: a review - PMC ("Chalcogenide semiconductor quantum dots"). I know some of those words lol.

It's clearly sci-fi but it would be insane if we managed to suddenly "contract" the hypercomplex economic supply chain of IC fab manufacturing into simply producing goop in vats that turns into electronics and computing hardware. Even just a rather simple grown microcontroller would be incredible. It would allow a small country to be more autark from global economic entanglements, more local instead of global.

It's a cool idea and I would love to see it too. But you would be better off making something entirely different that leverages the strengths of biological computing instead of trying to make an integrated circuit. Past 1980s node sizes we rapidly got so small its well below the size of a cell or even complex proteins. Our current technology is roughly the size of DNA itself, and proteins are monstrous in size by comparison and tend to wiggle around like jello due to Brownian motion at molecular scales.

Interestingly I think you could probably make a green PCB process though. Currently we use ferrous solutions to etch copper which need to be neutralized and wreak Havok on waterways if they aren't. I think making a biological biofilm that eats copper in certain areas and not others could work? It would be slower though, and honestly PCBs require some pretty intense feature sizes (not as bad as ICs but still really challenging) for things like tiny blind vias on extremely small traces. (Btw vias are like bridges from one layer of a circuit board to the next. A through via goes all the way through. A blind via is hidden within internal layers inside of a board)

Where I think this could be really cool is masking out vias and having your microbe drill for you over time. Surprisingly a large part of a PCB's cost is tungsten drill bits. It's still the fastest and most accurate way to drill fiberglass for forming vias but it's slow when you need to do hundreds or thousands per board. For extremely small vias the bits get insanely expensive and fragile too.

Yeah I'm not clear about the scales. The article I linked talks about 1-3nm scale quantum dots semiconductors. I think the scale also influence performance like clock rate and waste heat production. So this idea might just be impossible, or only viable for pretty large and slow devices. For microcontrollers it might be enough though. And this might be able to make use of 3D better than lithography and be more compact.

I do imagine that biological cells could become the real "nanobots" that could be used for fabrication. Like nanobots might never be real because if they could work they'd already have evolved in nature. But maybe we could program cells to grow in very specific and complex shapes in a vat for fabrication, and different areas turn into different colors and material properties. This kinda must be possible. An alternative to injection molded plastics. PCBs could definitely work, although there might be a reason why they stick with fiberglass if the drill bits cost so much lol. I can also imagine this for "organ 3D printing".

Each preceding society built the foundations of the next. Collectivization of production and distribution is made a simpler and easier task than it would have been under feudalism precisely because markets have already socialized and stitched together production. It's the distribution that is privatized, and this is because ownership of capital is individual. Socialism is a historic progression on this.

You're right, actually for Apple it's like $25

I'd be really surprised if it's that low. I get that it's low but no way it's under $100. It's always been at least that.