The first example includes cost of labour. The second example doesn't.
Two people playing with that cluster for a couple of hours cost more than $45.
Still, the author is right that when building physical products sometimes things are a lot more expensive than you think they're going to be because you're following some strict protocol.
Yes, you are absolutely right. But I think this is not the main point of the article.
The main point is that in a huge corporation with rules for purchasing and choosing suppliers, there's an insane amount of labor spent in administration even for purchasing even the most mundane things, as soon as it's something deviating from "the norm".
I've worked in a highly regulated industry, in a pretty big company, and my experience was the following: If you always order €1000 devices from a company, this company is registered in the internal databases, and had an audit from your quality assurance company. All traffic-lights will be green. You order the device, you, your boss, the financial responsible or whatever signs the document and they will bill one hour of work for that single-hand-move operation, which will be in the order of €100/$100. Total cost for your department of project: €1100 for tie €1000 device.
Now if you are in the lab, and think it's cool to use that Arduino shield for $10 on seedstudio for your lab-setup (which is probably a completely reasonable approach, as you only want to turn on/off that light/motor/... you normally would have to do manually for your experiment/measurement/test) the pain begins:
Seedstudio is not on the list of approved vendors, the QA team has to be persuaded that this is not a item that will ever reach a customers installation so they don't travel there to do an audit of the ISO9000 compliance (or whatever special regulation your partícular industry demands). Purchasing will complain that seedstudio has never signed your "terms of order" (and they will just throw away the 10-page-legalese anyway for $10...). And controlling will complain endlessly about the "proper inventory code" for a "seedstudio stepper motor shield". They'll also give you a sticker and make it a "IT inventory item" because it can be connected to a PC. In the end you'll have 5 people bill each 2 hours on that issue, and your project will be billed 52$100 + $10 = 1010$ of the Arduino shield. And you'll be known as "that hacker guy" that "constantly orders strange things from chinese companies" through the whole company.
Everyone new to that kind of big corporation tries this once, or twice, and then decides that it's just not worth it. In practice, you'll buy it on your private credit card, and hand it in as "travel expenses" on your next business trip. Or you'll have subcontractor already working with you that will order it for you, forward the device, and just put "Misc. manufacturing material. $50" on the next monthly $20'000 bill that on one will ever check.
Each of those arcane rules was probably put in place because someone a long time ago did something they weren't supposed to do. "Working the system" by intentionally ignoring the rules begs two questions: who needs these rules, and how long until you get caught and more rules are piled on for the next guy to get jaded about?
At some point it becomes madness. Sometimes that's when your company gets its lunch eaten.
Well, if you see it from the perspective of a corporation then procurement is probably one of the fields most ripe for fraud.
If you're just able to hand in an invoice to accounts payable then it's very, very easy to come up with bogus invoices. In fact this used to be a quite common scam.
Thus those rigid controls on all things procurement.
I worked for a variety of global companies and government entities. Setting up the whole invoicing process is generally a pain and usually you'll have to wait for a couple of month until the process works flawless.
Once it works it usually does work flawless.
I'm not arguing that this is great. But I can understand where a company is coming from, since the whole field of procurement is just a huge invite for fraud and abuse, if it's not rigidly controlled, which, I'm afraid, also involves an approved supplier list.
Indeed, a better way to fight this would be to start making the cost visible to your manager. Just start a spreadsheet, "item cost" vs "total company cost", resulting in "Cost overhead". Just hand these to your boss each month. No snarky comments, no aggression, just "Look, I have gathered some interesting information".
Once he sees a rather ridiculous cost overhead right there on paper and ideally even verfiable with your orders through other systems, interesting things happen. More often than not, management didn't know the excess of the situation.
We have department P-cards where we can buy small stuff from pretty much anyone who accepts credit cards, I think we can even do PayPal now. For large purchases we have to use approved vendors and there's red tape but it saves the company billions of dollars (literally, where I work).
In fact, in most large electronics companies the real money is made and lost in the supply chain so they have incredible power, annoying as it sometimes is.
Two people playing with that cluster for a couple of hours cost more than $45.
Still, the author is right that when building physical products sometimes things are a lot more expensive than you think they're going to be because you're following some strict protocol.