1) Apple had long term contracts for memory which will run out. Afterwards it will be very interesting to see what they do.
2) RPi uses older memory that is much much more expensive to buy in the market as manufacturers have dedicated capacity to newer formats used by AI boxes for KV caches
These perform way better and have similar efficiency, too. Case, power supply, cooling, and storage are all included too. If you don't need GPIO then you don't need a Raspberry Pi. If you do then consider using a microcontroller (Pi Pico, ESP32, etc.) first.
Not really the Pi's fault - really it's AI causing the massive increase in HW prices (notably RAM in this case) that has really destroyed the market for the Pi's.
Same thing happening for servers, gaming PC's, cell phones, so on.
I really don't know who this is targeted at. As a development board these are extremely expensive and as a mini computer you're far better off with something N100 based or similar.
Ecosystem bought in does not require you to buy the latest and most expensive board.
The Pi 1 model B+ was released in 2014. They still make and support it today and will keep doing it until at least 2030. You can just buy that instead. They are not apple.
Unfortunately Radxa and Milk-V are almost completely out of stock and not much cheaper. If you need more than a microcontroller there's no circumventing the memory shortage at this point.
Kicking myself for not buying the Q6A at the beginning of the year (I wanted three and arace would only sell one per customer, but one would've been better than none).
You're correct; they've jumped the shark.