I talked to a local guy at a breakfast a couple of days ago, who works at a place that uses RPi to make gadgets. His latest thing uses something known as "RPi 0W" and it's basically a normal RPi board but it costs $10! They made a custom board that is L-shaped and plugs into RPi 0W from the side. It has some power supply thingie and custom circuits they need for their radio and whatnot. Their sales are high enough to make an injection molded case. Either way, I remember when $35 RPi was considered very cheap.
@pro Well, the Pi zero is basically just an arduino with a modern processor.
@Moon @lanodan We're talking about this, right? It's one very small board, and has 1GHz ARM and 512MB RAM: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/
@pro A Standard Pi 0 is $5 and is basically the same thing as a $25 Pi A from the original line processor-wise. Of course, nobody uses Pi 0's anymore because everyone wants the wireless from the 0W. The newest thing is the Pi 02W which is as powerful as a Pi 3A, but for $15 instead of $25. It's impressive how much computing power you can get for $15 these days. That thing would give mainstream 2007 computers a run for its money, at less than 1% of the cost.
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@kazriko One other thing he mentioned was the availability. They migrated to Pi 0W initially because they could not buy the then-standard Pi that they were using, but 0W was easily available in quantity. I don't know how much product they ship, but I estimate about a 1,000 per year.
@pro That must have been in a more optimistic time. At this point, every model of Pi is basically always out of stock. Occasionally you see someone selling an expensive bundle with a Pi 400 or a Pi Pico that is still in stock, but that's still rare. There was a time when Pi 3a and 3b were still in stock quite a bit because the Pi 4 had replaced them, but even those are gone now.