The distance between a working prototype and a shippable product is not a straight line. It involves tradeoffs that surface at every stage: materials, tolerances, yield rates, sourcing constraints. What has changed over the past decade is how quickly manufacturers can cycle through these tradeoffs, and what it costs. Advances in CNC machining, PCB fabrication, and component-level testing have compressed development timelines, though not without creating new complexity for engineering teams moving products from first spin to volume production.
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