Originally Posted by
Paul Hynes
The RPi was designed for educational purposes, at least initially, and the concept taken on board by the major electronics distributors, allowing a massive market potential from the start. Because of this, development costs and business overhead costs can be spread over many tens of thousands of sales. Economy of scale, allowing manufacture in the far east, plus the originator’s charitable stance, have provided a stripped down basic computer motherboard at a very low cost indeed.
A nice side effect of the minimalist design of this motherboard is that it has the ability to process audio data streams in a benign way that allows very good audio performance. Products with this price/ability equation are in fact quite rare.