Lalit Arora
COO & Co-Founder, UBON"Lalit Arora is the Co-Founder and COO of UBON, one of India's leading consumer electronics and mobile accessory brands. An alumnus of Delhi University, he has spent over two decades scaling UBON into a household name. He spearheads human resource management, business process optimization, and talent acquisition. A fitness enthusiast, Lalit passionately champions local manufacturing and cutting-edge product innovation."
How brands can make products smarter without making them significantly more expensive
Walk into any electronics store today and almost everything claims to be “smart” in some way. Kettles that know your schedule, earbuds that adjust to noise, shoes that count steps you never asked them to count. Customers have gotten used to this. What they haven’t gotten used to is paying double for it. That’s the actual challenge product teams are wrestling with in 2026, not whether to add intelligence, but how to add it without the price tag doing something embarrassing.
A big part of the fix is boring, in a good way. It comes down to picking better components, not more of them. Chips today can handle sensing, wireless signals and basic processing all on one board, jobs that used to need three or four separate parts wired together by hand. Fewer parts on the line means fewer things that can go wrong, less time spent assembling, and a real drop in cost per unit before a single feature gets marketed.
Software does more heavy lifting than people give it credit for too. Half of what makes a gadget feel clever, alerts that learn your habits, small automatic tweaks, isn’t hardware at all. It’s code sitting on top of a sensor that was already there. Push an update and the product feels new again, no factory retooling required.
Then there’s timing. Parts that cost a premium a few years ago are dropping in price simply because so many industries are buying them in bulk now. Brands paying attention to where those costs are headed, rather than reacting once margins get squeezed, tend to launch smarter products sooner.
And sometimes the smartest call is holding back. One feature that genuinely helps beats five that just sound impressive on a box. Ultimately, building affordable tech isn’t about cutting corners; it is about sharp, deliberate focus. Consumers quickly see through flashy gimmicks that inflate the receipt without delivering practical daily utility. True innovation prioritizes careful engineering restraint, lower assembly friction, and clever software. When product teams master this balance, tech stops being an expensive novelty. It becomes an essential, reliable tool that seamlessly fits into everyday life without breaking the bank.
