And so, if a user of a Fantasy Computer wanted to have their home computer recalled, they could directly find a courier and send it to the specified address without waiting, and receive their host computer back in ten days.
If you chose to wait, you could drive your own car, taking no more than 5 hours to reach the nearest recall point.
You wouldn't even need to wait; simply hand over your old Fantasy Computer to them, and you would immediately receive a brand new Lingyun Fantasy Computer host. All the components would be pre-assembled, the system installed and debugged, and you could connect it to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard and use it right away.
In this way, Microsoft's perceived pain points for users were eliminated. It was perfectly normal for 3.2 million computer hosts to be replaced in the first month.
However, Microsoft still did not realize the seriousness of the problem. They believed this data was temporary and that the numbers would quickly decrease in the following months.
Firstly, old computers that had been in use for three years or more would only become fewer, and the first month would be the overall peak; there wouldn't be more after that.
Secondly, Jiangnan Group could not afford such costs. That's 3.2 million computers, and they were all being replaced with new ones. According to the computer configurations they managed to get, these computers had quite good specifications, with a retail price of around $800.
Even at half the cost price, it would still be around $400.
3.2 million computers at $400 each would amount to $1.3 billion. If they were giving them away like this every month… it seemed Jiangnan Group couldn't sustain it, but were they really willing to throw money away like this?
In Microsoft's analysis, Jiangnan Group's intention was likely just to create a sensational event, using this to quickly gain popularity and promote their 5-digit computers.
As for continuing to replace them like this, it was simply impossible. Huang He would not allow his money to be wasted like this.
Microsoft's thinking was not wrong, but the problem was they miscalculated one thing: the cost of such a computer was nowhere near $400, but less than $100.
Firstly, for any computer, the biggest cost is always its chip and graphics card. For a computer host with a general configuration costing around 5,000 yuan, the cost of the chip and graphics card would account for about 2,500 yuan.
But for Fantasy Computers, this cost was almost non-existent.
Firstly, Fantasy Computers would not equip these free computers with discrete graphics cards, so all these computers used graphics cards integrated into the chip, eliminating the cost of the graphics card itself.
As for the chips, although Intel or AMD chips often cost over 1,000 yuan, and some were even 2,000 to 3,000 yuan.
Of course, this was the price for external sales, not the actual production cost of the chips.
And Jiangnan Group itself was the world's largest and only producer of 5-digit chips. All 5-digit computer chips came from their production lines.
At the same time, due to the unique technology used by 5-digit chips, they no longer used traditional photolithography technology. Instead, they controlled the surface of black gold in extremely fine detail, causing different textures to form on the surface by themselves. Then, by selecting the defective ones, they could directly obtain a chip that was already etched as if by photolithography.
Therefore, the production cost of 5-digit chips was extremely low, and tens of thousands could be produced at once. If Jiangnan Group's factories operated at full capacity, their daily output could easily exceed one million.
In summary, the production cost of one 5-digit chip was equivalent to 1/10 of that of a binary chip, an alarmingly low cost. This was also why Jiangnan Group's 5-digit chips could always outperform their competitors in performance while also being priced lower.
Even with lower prices, Jiangnan Group always made much more profit than Intel.
And these computers, all used for replacement, used the same type of chip, with tens of millions produced at once, which further reduced the manufacturing cost of the chips. Ultimately, the ex-factory cost of each 5-digit chip was less than $3, which was almost negligible.
The more expensive costs were in the motherboard, memory modules, hard drives, cases, power supplies, and so on.
Among these components, only the memory modules could be produced by Jiangnan Group itself. For the rest, Jiangnan Group needed to procure them from other hardware manufacturers.
However, as long as the cost of the core chip could be reduced, the cost of these parts would not matter.
Jiangnan Group directly selected the most cost-effective components on its own alliance platform for procurement. At the same time, they frankly told those companies that they would no longer need to produce other products in the future and should dedicate all their production capacity to Jiangnan Group's orders.
Ultimately, the production cost of a computer with such overall mid-to-high-end configurations was suppressed to less than $100.
According to Jiangnan Group's internal cost reports, the most expensive component in this host was actually its case, as the case was manufactured using a brushed finish. Thus, even at bulk purchase prices, it was around $9, which was quite astonishing.
Next was the motherboard, with a cost price of around $8.5.
Below that was the power supply…
Oh, and the $100 also included shipping costs. Transporting such a computer host from China to Europe was not cheap, with an average shipping cost of about $5 per host.
Furthermore, due to the recall, these computers did not have to pay any import duties, otherwise the cost would have increased by tens of dollars.
In the end, for the 3.2 million computers sent out, Jiangnan Group directly paid less than $300 million, which was a small amount for Jiangnan Group.
However, Microsoft's prediction was not wrong, because in the second month, the number of recalled computers experienced a huge reduction, decreasing from 3.2 million units to around 2 million units.
In the third month, it dropped to 1.3 million units.
As Microsoft had predicted, most of the old Fantasy Computers were almost all redeemed.
This was because Fantasy Computer began to enter the international market around 2010. Currently, it had been 7 years, and the early operations were not very smooth until they started acquiring European companies in large numbers, which gradually increased their market share.
Therefore, the stock of Fantasy Computers older than three years in the European market was not large, as most computers were sold within three years. These computers were currently in their prime, and most users would not exchange their old computers for a newer one with a different operating system.
At the same time, after more old computers were replaced, many people did not want to keep them at home, selling them to scrap metal recyclers, or simply throwing them directly into the trash, thus further reducing the stock.
It is worth mentioning that this also led to a surge in prices for used Fantasy Computers. Previously, a three-year-old Fantasy Computer was practically worthless scrap, priced at around $10 to $20, with some even offering to mail the computer for free if the buyer paid for shipping.
After all, in many cases, you would have to pay a recycling fee to scrap metal recyclers for these computers.
However, the price of a used Fantasy Computer had now soared to an astonishing $300. After all, with such a computer, you could immediately exchange it for a new computer with a market price of around $800, which was a good deal.
However, the surge in the used market prices also indicated that the number of remaining Fantasy Computers was small. After three months, only about 6 million computers had been exchanged in total, which was a small number compared to the total computer ownership in Europe and did not pose a threat to the overall situation, so Microsoft could seemingly rest easy.
But soon, something happened that made the Microsoft president curse in the previous chapter: in the fourth month after the recall began, the data actually surged, jumping directly from 1.3 million units in the third month to 5.2 million units, exceeding the data from the first month and terrifying the people at Microsoft.
Microsoft immediately dispatched people to investigate what had happened. Could it be that all Fantasy Computer users had sent their computers for recall?
After Microsoft investigated and found out, their expressions became very strange. It turned out that all of this depended on the second month after the recall began.
In this month, a uploader on the internet, whether for the sake of the computer or for the sake of creating program effects, specifically found a host with the same exterior style as a certain Fantasy Computer host.
Then, he smoothed off all the labels on the outside of the host, opened the host case, and also smoothed off all the non-Fantasy Computer labels inside. Then he got Fantasy Computer labels and stuck them on, thus creating an old version of the Fantasy Computer.
Of course, if the inspectors opened the computer to check the hardware, they would find that it was not a Fantasy Computer at all.
The entire process was recorded by the uploader on video. Afterward, he drove his car with this computer to the nearest recall point, wanting to see if the Fantasy Computer staff could identify the problem with the computer.
As a result, he simply handed the computer over to the staff at the recall point. The staff member took a brief look at the exterior of the computer host, then immediately had it moved into the warehouse, and then handed a brand new host to the uploader on the spot. When this uploader, holding the new computer, returned to his car in disbelief, it had been less than 5 minutes since he got out of the car.