>>1450401>at the point when they were easy to produce Even when you didn't need clean rooms to make transistors the equipment was all very bleeding edge and there were not nearly as many vendors so the price was incredibly high. They have never been "easy" to produce and otherwise we would see many more people building them in their garage but so far only TWO people have successfully made transistors in a garage lab, because it's very unforgiving and with inaccurate equipment you have to repeat what you are doing over and over to account for small errors.
>patent hoarding and licensing costsUmm no sweetie this is CRONY CORPORATE SOCIALISM. The kind in Sweden where the license fees are abhorrent but when you sell the government a piece of your company you get an exception. Free market proponents NEVER defend patents. And also you are very disingenuous to imply that the manufacturing costs haven't gone down implicitly.. DO YOU THINK CHINA CARES ABOUT PATENTS WHEN THEY HAVE DRIVEN THE PRICE OF SEMICONDUCTORS DOWN MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE????? Sorry for capitalization but idiots like you can't be trusted to pay attention to the most important parts of paragraphs.
