[cwt137]

Raspberry Pi Foundation does the "minimum order of 1000" and passes the savings on to you. Try and buy all the individual components of a RPi Zero and see how much it costs. It is way more than $15.

P.S. The RPi Zero does not come with a display and keyboard like the computer in this article does. So, we are talking about two different types of computers.

[nousermane]

$15 is a pretty good guess for per-unit cost of mass-produced RPi0, I reckon.

Look at the price of "WH" version with superficial changes that cost pennies to add (wifi chip and 0.1" header), and (used to be) easily obtainable with no limit on the order size. Or, at least that was the status quo before the the great chip shortage of 2021.