But I think they have smoked too much dope.
150€ excl. VAT for the 'dev-kit', which is nothing else than some low to midrange, RPI-like SBC, soldered together from used stuff(no matter how, roboticcally, by hand) is not competitive.
15 to 50 would be.
Maybe there is still a market at this price point, for example if there are tax breaks, or the price of the thing you are selling is so much that the customer just swallows the extra price.
I still think it would be better if we were to go the way of modular systems. I'm currently building out a controller system that has a modular interface and should be upgradeable as I swap out components and improve it, without adding much to the overall footprint. I think this really is the way forwards with this kind of thing.
google is telling me around 400k phone like devices are thrown out into landfills everyday, there might be a market to bring down costs eventually if they get logistics properly moving
And this has 4G/LTE (because it is a smartphone) so comparisons to base RPis are largely irrelevant.
And in industrial embedded Linux stuff there is essentially no correlation between price and performance. Most don't need performance and they aren't really cost-optimizing this bit of the production line very hard. It just needs to be certifiable, reliable and replacable.
I do hope they come down a lot in price and prove this out over many more phone variants.
I think those are some good unanswered questions here. The supply of used phones is pretty cyclical, and almost all of them are out of production when their supply peaks.
Also pretty much all smartphones rely heavily on components without data sheets and with proprietary firmware blobs that won't be updated or patched without first-party support, or at all.