Paul Graham explains why more and more startups are producing hardware.

One question I can answer is why hardware is suddenly cool.It always was cool.Physical things are great. They just haven’tbeen as great a way to start a rapidly growing businessas software. But that rule may not be permanent. It’s not eventhat old; it only dates from about 1990. Maybe the advantageof software will turn out to have been temporary. Hackers love tobuild hardware, and customers love to buy it. So if the ease ofshipping hardware even approached the ease of shipping software,we’d see a lot more hardware startups.