"Aruna Hewapathirane via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

Some of the fruit named Pi boards have hardware specs way better as well
but price is very affordable.
I am wondering why the price is so low compared to the Raspberry Pi ? Or
are we simply paying for the Raspberry brand name ?

I think it's the usual Chinese manufacturing cost advantage.  Those fruit
and nano pi's are from Shenzhen or Guangzhou.
Professor Michael Hudson wrote a book, _Killing the Host_.  He lays out
the fact that with the Finance/Insurance/Real-Estate processing ~40% of
GDP in US or UK, that functions as overhead cost on US/UK manufacturing. 
You just can't match Chinese prices with that level of management cost.