Sun Aug 30, 2015 12:54 am
The people that started the RPF set a price target, informed by their knowledge of the business, then worked to find a way to make a usable SBC within that target, and allowing for some profit margin for the manufacturing, distribution. and retail sales (without those margins, nobody would make or sell it!). Part of the reason they're able to do that is that the RPF doesn't have to make the usual profit markup. They have had to compromise on what features are present in order to have that price. Just look at threads where people ask for this or that feature and are told, "No, that would require the price to go up."
The general trend of electronic components is for prices to decrease over time, so holding the price isn't as hard as you might think. What drives up the price of many devices is actually "feature creep"--that is, more features are added so that, while the prices of the parts goes down, more parts have to be incorporated. The RPF is very good at resisting that effect and only making changes when they can incorporate *good* changes that actually enhance the device and still hold the line on price. This is why there is no "Pi2A" yet.
There are other companies and projects that meet the price of the Pi. Some of them are arguably more powerful/faster systems. Generally, all the effort is put into the hardware and the software isn't very well supported. This is another trap the RPF has managed to avoid.