@bread80 oh absolutely, though I would say Amstrad's cost-driven hardware hackery skills are right up there with Commodore, the latter of whom had the advantage of owning MOS/CSG so could extend the hackery fully into the ICs themselves. Amstrad of course flexed these skills in HiFi.
The whole industry was notorious for corner cutting, but at great detriment to usability (horrible keyboards, lack of power, poor graphics and sound etc). Commodore and Amstrad seemed to be leaders in finding ways to cut cost that preserved desirable features...and sometimes caused frustration for programmers!