There's economic reasons behind the cheap SoCs you see. Invariably it's when an SoC was made in bulk expecting some market that never materialized. For instan

There's economic reasons behind the cheap SoCs you see. Invariably it's when an SoC was made in bulk expecting some market that never materialized. For instance the original Pi SoC was very clearly intended for some set top box OEM that didn't pick it up for some reason. When that happens, after a while the chip manufacturer is willing to sell them for way below cost just to get anything back from their inventory that from their perspective looks like a complete loss. So you get an industrious cottage industry that takes those to cheap to make sense chips, cost reduces the reference design, and ships them with the just barely building sdk from the chip manufacturer. At the end of the day Qualcomm doesn't care about this market because they are pretty good about keeping their customers on the hook for their bulk orders. So they're focused on supporting current bulk customers where a $1k dev board is actually a really reasonable price.