Kind of serious question: or are the price increases because they are a publicly traded company now?

Bugger!

Recently asked raspi foundation if they could do a sku with less ram for order quantity 1000. Answer was no.

IIRC the lowest skus with wifi and mmc for the CM4 & CM5 are 4gb & 8gb respectively. We only need 1gb of ram.

We were going to the CM4 to save 10usd/unit, at the cost of dramatically lower emmc write speed (slow factory programming times). I'll have to check how much worse the price gap is now :D

Very much wishing for a competitor with reliable wifi drivers, upstream support and sim prices (or lower). Can't wait for universal distro images that work on any sbc too ( continues dreaming )