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Product safety approvals on a power supply are a lot more expensive than $50. More like $2500 on a supply this size and that varies on how many countries you want to sell your product in. Country specific deviations will add to the total. Manufacturers try to cut cost as much as they can.
BTW, my $50 figure was for the power supply itself, not the approvals.

Anyway, there's no question it's a business, a tough one w/low volume, and every penny counts. However, the #'s of cheaping out on a power supply still don't make sense to me.

Let's say M makes 1K per G68 sold. And let's assume that the power supply upgrade made a major improvement. Reviews and word-of-mouth would likely reflect this -- let's assume it generated sales of 10 more units. There's another 10K in profits that would cover approvals. Oversimplifying, but you get the point.

You could argue that such an SQ and therefore value improvement -- 'the G68 rivals processors costing many times more in SQ' (so go the reviews) -- would generate even more sales -- now we've covered the costs and are making add'l profit.

M could probably also simply add $100 or more to the price of the unit -- would this stop anyone from buying at this price level ?

A hole in this argument is that reviews and word-of-mouth are only part of the story -- marketing (all facets of it) is what generates sales more than anything.

But SQ is obviously very important to most M customers, and again, a few hundred bucks at these price levels is unlikely to be a deal breaker.

Counterpoint went out of business smile Maybe they would have been better off charging an extra $200/amp and doing it better from the start.

Arcam advertised that they spent 1 million dollars to develop the AV8 processor -- cutting a 10 or 20K corner doesn't make sense in this kind of scenario.