Think the Pine guys are doing what the Raspberry peeps should have done long ago: releasing products with 3-4GB of RAM. This way consumer facing devices are not constantly disk trashing for swap disk when browsing the web.
Raspberry Pi _could_ have offered 4GB+ of it, and they could also have quadrupled the price.
As much as I'd love a Pi with 4GB+ of RAM, is quite obvious why the $35 computer doesn't have it.
Raspberry Pi's SoC does not support more RAM than the 1 GiB that it now has. This is as far as I am aware considered a serious problem by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
I don't know by what they thus plan to replace the SoC in the future.
As I understand it the SoC in the Pi was some older IP that was licensed to them (RPF/Eben) for free (or close to) by Broadcom.
The RPF will have to sink so significant cost into a new SoC (and I choose to believe that this is already happening, as we speak).
The reason is because it can't. Almost all SBCs are based on TV boxes (including the Rasberry Pi) which don't need more than 4 GB of RAM and are designed to only support that much.
Edit : "Pricing will remain the same with the 1GB model priced at $24.95, the 2GB model at $34.95, and the 4GB model at $44.95."
QED.
I don't see how the Pi Foundation can cater to all of them. Although, I do expect the Pi 4 next year to address at least some of them.
In the mean time, there are great devices, like the RockPro64.