[temp5678]

It's not the PCB that's expensive. It's the components on it.

[DanBC]

That's often not true; PCBs can be a significant cost on the bill of materials for a gadget.

Amortising the tooling / artwork costs into big volumes helps, but even then the PCB is usually one of the more expensive items on the parts list.

[easp]

Yup, it was interesting reading some of the discussions about the design of the device. PCB cost was a major consideration. They aren't exposing some of the I/O pins on the SoC because it would require a more expensive PCB to do so.

[sliverstorm]

Custom small-time boards get expensive quickly when you shoot for tighter tolerances, which are necessary for truly tight spacing. If Raspberry Pi expects to sell 10 million units, then even a fancy board will cost nothing, but I doubt they are planning on such numbers...

[nobody31415926]

Board design is expensive for small units - but assembly costs for complex boards don't drop very much with large numbers.

Especially if Apple have every super high-end pick and place robot booked for the next n years!