making and assembling small parts with fine tolerances is not really any less expensive than making and assembling larger parts with comparatively the same tolerances.
I wasn’t ever involved with manufacture of the individual parts, so I don’t have direct experience.
I suspect it’s just that as you go smaller, material costs become negligible compared with process costs. Process costs don’t change much, because you still need humans to oversee the machines carrying out the processes, and there are similar numbers of processes with as many steps involved no matter how large or small the parts are. The processes themselves might be different, because some just can’t scale down below a certain size for physics reasons, but it doesn’t get easier at smaller scales.
Also, direct human labour still plays a fairly crucial role in most processes. There are (so far) always some things to be done where human capabilities exceed those of any machine we can build at reasonable cost.
Seems like the key claim:
Can you give any hint why that is or could be?
I wasn’t ever involved with manufacture of the individual parts, so I don’t have direct experience.
I suspect it’s just that as you go smaller, material costs become negligible compared with process costs. Process costs don’t change much, because you still need humans to oversee the machines carrying out the processes, and there are similar numbers of processes with as many steps involved no matter how large or small the parts are. The processes themselves might be different, because some just can’t scale down below a certain size for physics reasons, but it doesn’t get easier at smaller scales.
Also, direct human labour still plays a fairly crucial role in most processes. There are (so far) always some things to be done where human capabilities exceed those of any machine we can build at reasonable cost.