The Garmin Watches don't have DRAM for power reasons. The processor is a memory constrained microcontroller without a hardware memory management unit. Without the MMU you don't get as powerful memory virtualization or process isolation.
People with direct experience of the manufacturing sector in the US and abroad (including me) will certainly tell you that America's capabilities have deteriorated, at least relative to other countries. The machine tool industry is considered a good bellwether for industrial capacity and there's been some good research on this topic if you're interested: http://www.bismarckanalysis.com/Machine_Tools_Case_Study.pdf
Why is this downvoted? Seems to present a cogent argument (whereas its parent is a mere assertion) and I'm interested to see any well-sourced rebuttals to it. Anecdotally, I have had a similar impression -- it seems to me like across a wide variety of product categories, it's rare if even possible to find American manufacturers. Go even to a high end department store selling upmarket goods and check where manufactured items are made; very few complex products seem to be in the US.
Edit -- by comparison, when I lived in Japan I found it extraordinarily easy to buy locally made products of all sorts; pots and pans, coffee mugs, water bottles, stationery, clothes, shoes, electronics, tools, injection molded plastic items, paper products, everything. Even in their equivalent of dollar stores. Sometimes they were a bit more expensive than those produced in China/Vietnam/Indonesia, but often they were price competitive. It was weird coming back to North America and adapting to not being able to find anything locally made.
I work in defense. I've literally watched a team put together a factory line to build fighter jets fuselages. We can build whatever we want, and the numbers reflect this.
We don't build low margin anything because nobody would buy it if it costs more.
Japan is a good example - they setup all their car factories in the US in the South specifically to avoid union labor costs! Many Japanese cars, for our market, are made... Right here! Because the shipping and labor overhead would make them uncompetitive.
Fighter jets are almost a cost-is-no-object project, so to me at least, it isn't a good proxy for a country's manufacturing prowess.
Your ability to build something is measured by how cheaply you can build that thing. This means that if I can make something more cheaply than you can, I'm actually better at making it than you are, assuming the end product is the same. (You can also cheapen something by cutting corners on the design or materials, but then you're making a different thing).
Can we make an iPhone? Yeah, we design not only the chips here but the circuit boards. They're prototyped here!
Can we increase our margins by throwing the chemicals into the local river and having people manually stand there for 12 hour shifts breathing in toxic chemicals to manually polish them? Yup.
But the skills to build low-volume, high-margin fighter jets are distinct from the skills to build high-volume, low-margin toasters. They'll be some overlap, don't get me wrong, but quantity has a quality all of its own.
I've looked at the financials of hearing aid companies before. And the short answer is that the money is not going to the hearing aid company. Of the $5k you spent on your hearing aid, the hearing aid company was probably paid $500, and the other $4.5k went to the audiologist.
The problem is that most consumers' revealed preference is for better performance rather than replaceability or device longevity (I know some people here will express a different preference, but you are a minority of consumers). Consumers don't factor device longevity into their purchase decisions, so companies don't prioritize it during the design process. And it needs to be prioritized because design decisions for longevity involve tradeoffs with other device performance metrics like size, weight, battery life (you can improve battery longevity by decreasing the depth of discharge of the battery before a recharge is required), processor performance, price.
Unfortunately this article clearly demonstrates the problems companies face when they try to improve longevity at the cost of performance. Apple implemented processor throttling based on measured battery condition to improve the longevity of their devices, but even in this article, seemingly focused on device longevity, they still receive criticism for this decision:
"But even consumers who hang onto their old iPhones for as long as possible learned in 2017 that Apple released a software update that slows down old phones to counteract aging lithium-ion battery problems."
> most consumers' revealed preference is for better performance rather than replaceability or device longevity
Because replaceability and longevity are hidden and obfuscated by the manufacturer. How can you talk about 'preference' when consumers don't have the information in the first place, or, in many cases, even any alternatives?
Throttling CPU in a non-transparent and non-configurable manner is not an acceptable means to increase longevity.Maybe it works for your grandmother who just wants to continue to send text messages, but most people want to use their smartphones for running actual applications.
Particularly when iphone batteries have honestly not shown to be that difficult to replace batteries of. But when you start throttling perceived performance, you're not willing to replace battery for something that as far as you know has lost it's ability to perform at it's original capacity.
I agree with your first point, but it's frankly absurd to imply that secret CPU throttling is a remotely acceptable manner of extending longevity.
You say consumers have expressed that but I'm not actually sure that is true. Sure people often buy things that are less durable but it is hard to tell the longevity of many products in advance, especially of tech for non techy people.
I used to do computer repair and the number of people who were furious to discover, years after they bought it, just how uneconomical it was to repair certain Apple products due to how unmodular those products were.
Plus say I'm buying headphones, obviously (to technologically aware people) wireless ones will break more often because they have more parts that can break and have batteries that will eventually go out. But after that I'm kind of stuck with buying a brand that has a good history, people don't write reviews of currently available products saying "I've owned these for 6 years now and they still work". And even if those reviews exist the company may have changed the internals of the product by now so that review is no longer valid.
Sure consumer purchase patterns don't reward building for longevity and I agree with that, but I disagree that consumers have necessarily expressed they don't care very much about it.
Skaevola didn’t say “expressed preference.” He/she said “revealed preference.” I.e. revealed by actual purchases. This is more meaningful than any other “expression.”
I can't speak to the CC26xx series specifically, but normally deeply embedded cores running a ROM stack like that have some additional SRAM which can be loaded at boot for firmware patches.
