Hardware has a significant marginal cost to deploy.

A general economic claim, judged as of September 2017. True: economic and industry sources show that deploying each additional unit of hardware has a substantial per-unit cost (materials, manufacturing, shipping, installation), especially compared with software's near-zero marginal cost. Mostly true: this holds for most physical hardware, with some narrow exceptions. Mixed: the evidence shows hardware marginal costs are significant in some important categories but negligible in many others. Mostly false: hardware marginal deployment costs are generally shown to be small. False: hardware has been shown to have essentially no marginal deployment cost.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Digital Economics - NBER NBER (Avi Goldfarb and Catherine Tucker) · 13 December 2017

   “Put differently, the cost of distribution for digital goods approaches zero and the difference in the cost of nearby and distant communication approaches zero.”

2. E2 Roomba’s Father Says Robots Will Evolve - EE Times EE Times · 16 November 2017

   “Today, more than half the cost of a factory robot goes to systems integrators who configure it with sensors and train it, typically writing custom programs and generating proprietary data that stays on the factory floor.”

E1, an NBER economics review, says the distribution cost of digital goods approaches zero, which sets up the contrast with physical goods the claim relies on. It does not give per-unit hardware costs. E2 says more than half the cost of a factory robot goes to systems integrators who configure and train it, so deploying each robot carries a large per-unit cost. Together these independent sources broadly support the claim, but they are indirect and cover limited categories, so the verdict is mostly true rather than true.