More people would buy them if they were cheaper. That's simple economics. They are priced right now to extract maximum $ from the market, not to ensure that the largest number of people have access. 100's of millions of people world wide have hearing issues, some 15-20% iirc.
Sure, it's simple economics, but in this case it is too simple.
It turns out that the hearing aid market has inelastic demand [1][2]. In 2010, market penetration for hearing aids in the U.S. was around 24% (8.2 million users). Amlani estimated that with a complete subsidy of hearing aids, market penetration would only increase to 34% (11.2 million users) [1].
Combined with the lifespan of 5-8 years, that is a quite small scale for an asic. (Apple will sell 40+ million airpods this year alone).
[1]: Amlani, A. M. (2010). Will government subsidies increase the US hearing aid market penetration rate? Audiology Today, 22(2), 40-46.
[2]: Lee, K. & Lotz, P. (1998). Noise and silence in the hearing instrument industry. Working Paper, Department of Industrial Economics & Strategy, Copenhagen Business School.
> Amlani estimated that with a complete subsidy of hearing aids, market penetration would only increase to 34% (11.2 million users) [1].
That's an interesting use of the word 'only', you're looking at a 30% or so increase and at that scale this would not have a huge affect on the price of the chip itself because once the costs of developing and the start-up costs have been born the rest is marginal. These chips probably cost < $2 to produce even at this quantity.
What you seem to forget is that once it is worth doing an ASIC that is pretty much proof that the economies of scale are there. The very rare cases where an ASIC is still expensive is when they are top of the line in switching speed, density or pin count and these devices have none of that.
A ~thousand to several thousand dollar product with a market penetration of 24% (low) becomes completely free, and the market penetration shifts to 34% (still low). I think 'only' is justified.
> the costs of developing and the start-up costs have been born the rest is marginal
The NRE costs have not been 'born' until the product is EOL. They are distributed across the price of each unit. My hypothesis is that this chip has a sufficiently low volume that the NRE cost / chip is substantial.
> What you seem to forget is that once it is worth doing an ASIC that is pretty much proof that the economies of scale are there
When you have strict power requirements (i.e. need a battery life of a month), it can still make sense to go for an ASIC even with relatively low volume. Add to this an inelastic demand curve (i.e. you will sell the same number independent of price), and there isn't a compelling reason to try to do it with a DSP or FPGA.
> These chips probably cost < $2 to produce even at this quantity
If we assume that OnSemi could design this chip for $10M, then they would have to sell 5M of them to have your proposed unit cost of < $2 (assuming a wafer cost of zero, which is obviously wrong). I would guess that $10M is a lowball for the total development cost, and that 5M is way optimistic for volume (that would pretty much require this random chip is in 100% of hearing aids sold in the U.S. in the last few years). They've probably sold an order of magnitude less than that.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but it isn't as obvious to me as it apparently is to you.
