Glossary / Sunk cost

Sunk cost

Money already spent that cannot be recovered. In hardware a large share of development spend is sunk, which raises the stakes of every irreversible decision.

Introduced in Chapter 1 — Why is Hardware THAT Hard? of Tangibles.

Related terms

• Externalities — Costs (or benefits) of a product borne by third parties or the environment rather than its maker or buyer — for example, the waste a device leaves behind.
• Tooling — The molds, jigs, and fixtures built to mass-produce a part.
• Sensor fusion — Combining inputs from multiple sensors — motion, biometric, vision — into a richer signal than any one sensor provides; the highest level of the interface stack.
• Switching cost — What a customer must give up to move to a competitor.