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I was working a project where the BOM was to be at most 50 bucks. It is kind of difficult to hit that number. Ironically while the board was cheap it was all the additions to make it a full computer that ended up ruining the idea. That was even before we add in any profit margin. Add in a screen, keyboard, mouse, power supply, and so on. It adds up quickly. What was a 15-20 dollar computer is now 70-80 or more plus paying someone to put it together.

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Could it be kept fairly close to $50 if it was simply a "box" with a few relatively high speed USB ports and an HDMI connector?

I know this wouldn't be a "laptop", but with a cheap-ish monitor, keyboard and mouse... it's a small PC. Perhaps with a slightly older CPU which doesn't need super fast RAM, there could be... 2Gb of RAM or more?

Of course the newer RaspberryPi boards are pretty close (and in terms of RAM, even better) to this....

Oh we got 'close'. But the issue was it felt like 'oh yeah we need X' that X would be 2-3 more dollars, and so on. Really at this point the board is the 'meh' part of it. When you are at this price point. Something like an extra USB port becomes a larger portion of the bill. Also at this price point something odd happens. Your support costs also grow much faster. As you will attract more people to the platform at a lower cost. So your margin is not there. Also when you build 1 or 2 you can do that in an afternoon. But when you want 10k of them it becomes a bigger issue of simple things like 'how do I get these into the cardboard boxes', or 'where do I source 10k power cables that are not garbage'.

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