In the mean time, everyone went meh
I disagree - You have to understand how powerful the arduino brand is. Yes. You, me and most people on this forum would buy a generic "atmel 328 dev board" for $4.
But not the general public. My sister knows what an arduino is - and she's never soldered or programmed anything other then a microwave. Yet, she knows the name. Guess what she will buy for her kid - and arduino.
everyone ....started buying Chinese clones for 1/4 of the price...
Nope - only 0.01% of people(guestimate). Why do you think people come up with names for things like this? uCurrent? Arduino, Rasberry Pi. It's all about the brand.
So how will they do the volumes?
Are they expanding their manufacturing?
I can say that adafruit only runs their PNP 8 hours a day. When visited by samsung PNP guys/gals, the tech were agasp by that. They are use to having the machines to 3-4 shifts. So I would say they have a ton of capability. But if you really want to know - ask Phillip during an ask-an-engineer. I plan to! I would like to know as well.
Your sister (buying the name brand) is probably typical. But likely, that would be a one-time purchase and stays in the drawer after blinking the first LED. Folks who works with it more eventually will learn that there are stuff out there at 1/4 the price. The second board, the third "shield" or module... so on, would likely be the 1/4 price clones.
Schools are perhaps the more reliable name-brand purchasers. Schools are spending tax-payer money. There is no such thing as "too expensive" when someone else is paying.
Speaking of schools, I am in the school of thought that he who owns the IDE owns the show. Arduino.org can make whatever board they want to make, if Arduino.cc (say now called itself MCU-4-U) doesn't support it, how is this Arduino-Minus-One even going to blink the first LED? (Uno was last year, Zero was yesterday, now into sign bit must flip).
Without the IDE, in a few months, even schools will stop buying them. Most teachers will need the IDE's example "blink" to run before they would (could) include it in their class. For the many other schools that may keep the Minus, they would likely not leave school-grounds (because without IDE example "blink", it could seem so difficult to blink the silly LED). So they cannot expect students to be revenue streams. At some point as support drops, even the Chinese Cloners will stop making cheap modules for the "minus" -- because here is no ready-made library for their cloned modules and they wont invest in writing it themselves. The lack of general enthusiast support will quickly kill the whole line. Lacking such omnipresence support, Arduino-Minus-Two will never get off the drawing board.
Can you imagine Google without google.com? That would be Arduino without IDE.
MCU-4-U can just find other revenue source, such as $ for official-seal of support. More dollars to have better integration into the IDE, and may be links to the shop...
I think IDE is the real show here...