Earbuds often have features like mic beam forming and noise cancellation which require a substantial degree of processing power. It's hardly unjustified compared to your Teams instance making fans spin or Home Assistant bringing down an RPi to its knees.

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nehalem 5 hours ago | parent [-]

No doubt, maybe should I have emphasised the "general" part of "general purpose" more. Not a hardware person myself, I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.

	▲	Aurornis an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA. FPGAs are not cost efficient at all for something like this. MCUs are so cheap that you’d never get to a cheaper solution by building out a team to iterate on custom hardware until it was bug free and ready to scale. You’d basically be reinventing the MCU that can be bought for $0.10, but with tens of millions of dollars of engineering and without economies of scale that the MCU companies have.
	▲	nicoburns 19 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply Where are you imagining costy savings coming from? Custom anything is almost always vastly more expensive than using a standardised product.