eternaltransit

An aircraft seat is completely unlike building a house and buying an off-the-shelf computer and hooking up to a tv screen and putting some bling finishings around it though...

Consider that the seat has a seven year life at most + design time (from scratch for most of these flagship products) - so with the house analogy, you aren't just building the property, you are hiring an architect and design team to design it from scratch and then build it. Then you have to build something that is going to get abused every day for the next seven years by all manner of people and yet has to work pretty much perfectly with little downtime for maintenance.

Of course, let us not forget that we are talking about something that goes in an aircraft. Seats and everything about them need to be safety certified. New aircraft seats need to withstand 16G of force applied to them without injuring the occupant. You need stringent thermal and acoustic insulation. Remember that each of these seats is going to be individually designed for an airline, at least, for the first airline that purchases them, and so you are going to have to do the whole process from scratch.

Then of course airline customers demand the lightest product possible - every gram is going to be scrutinised for possible reduction. So, a lot of investment is going to go into finding the best possible materials for the job.

Moving onto IFE - it's not much of an incremental cost compared to the cost of a seat, but the same considerations for power efficiency and space and weight - so you're talking about terabytes of solid-state storage for the main server, many many cores which are going to be more powerful than your cell phone etc. etc. I think there's information floating about on the internet with regards to IFE systems.

But the major seat cost comes from the specifications that airlines and regulators require. 500k USD is not unreasonable.