Obviously you picked a part that is the most expensive part of it by far, and a clone could just have a little bit smaller screen, even with the same resolution, to case for that, and the efficient price would never go beyond 50$ in any case. What I said about the devkits I've developed for is 100% true. The price is ~30$ with the screen, SoC, microphones, etc etc ALL peripherals, packaging, actually good documentation including datasheets and multiple example projects for TWO whole different ecosystems.

Nintendo's economies of scale is irrelevant here as A. They obviously have enormous markup compared to hardware price, because they can, and B. Those waveshare devkits aren't built with insane numbers, but they manage to keep their prices down very well.

These are just some of the examples I was talking about https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-touch-lcd-3.5.htm https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-s3-touch-lcd-3.5.htm?sku=309... https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-s3-touch-amoled-2.06.htm?sku...

To put nails down the coffin of the argument about "economies of scale" here, just check how many alternative devkits they have. I'm sure that some of these have barely sold to triple digits. But the quality has been good for all I've seen from them https://www.waveshare.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=touch+esp3...

And for the "retro emulation" hardware that goes way beyond in specs but stays at ~50$: https://anbernic.com/products/rg35xx

Panic has had their fun. Time to commoditize the ecosystem.