Maple has no network or USB and is thus not really comparable.

Part of being so cheap might be that the main SoC is subsidized by Broadcom. I have no problem with that, TI is doing the same for the Pandaboard (http://www.pandaboard.org)

The big thing going for them price-wise is that due to them being a charity, Broadcom is selling them the SoC at prices you would normally only get when buying millions of them, rather than the thousands that they will actually end up buying. Plus I think a lot of the engineers etc donated their time, again because it is an educational charity, thus their R&D was probably very cheap.

Thus we end up getting a device that is smaller and more capable than the Beagleboard XM (CPU- and graphics-wise) at one sixth of the price.

Well, for one thing, they have the advantage of launching their product later.

For another, they have access to good pricing on a capable SoC that isn't usually available in small volumes at any price. In other words, they knew the right people.

And yeah, they've been very aggressive about other costs too. For example, the alignment of the various connectors on the board are all funkey, because it was cheaper that way.

"just optimized the bom" is really easy to say and hard to do. If it was so easy to cut down the bill of materials of what was previously $150+ (Beagle) to $35 (Raspberry), wouldn't TI have done so with the Beagle?

Also, it's like saying that DarkShikari et al. "just optimized the code" to make x264 the best easily-available encoder of H.264 on the planet.

Finally, the Raspberry Pi is tremendously more powerful than the Maple.