As we mentioned a week or so back, the dock for the Nexus 7 is in the wild, now we have a tear-down video for your viewing pleasure.
The Nexus 7 dock consists of a molded plastic style body with Nexus branding on the front side and ASUS branding on the rear along with the micro USB and 3.5mm audio inputs. The dock is designed to hold the 7-inch Google flagship at a slight angle while charging the device with no need for physically connecting a USB cable to the device itself. The bottom of the unit is covered by a sort of an anti-slip padding to keep it in place on your desk or bed-side table. There are four pogo pins in the floor of the tray that connect to the pogo pins on the side of the Nexus 7. This is where you get your charging and audio connection. If you think that is simple and maybe even quite cheap for a $40US retail price, wait until you see the inside.
It turns out that there is really not much to this device as far as internals are concerned either. The circuit board looks to be about one-inch square and consists only of a micro USB input and a 3.5 mm stereo headphone output. The secondary board is basically just four pogo pins sticking out of a very small circuit board. That is all there is to it. Factor in that they made these things in mass numbers and you will start to see just how far up they pushed the profit margin.
Now, by no means do we expect these things to be state-of-the-art pieces of gadgetry, but for $40US, we as the consumer should expect just a little more. By the looks of the video, the manufacturer may have spent as much on screws to hold the bottom on as they did on the internals of the device. This is the way things have gone for some time now, especially with bargain priced items in most every consumer category. They make what they can on the original sale and then mark the prices of accessories way up to account for the low margins. We are not saying that it is right, it is however, the way it is and don’t look for those kind of mark-ups to go away anytime soon.
Source: Anton Gorbunov-YouTube