[ProDigit]

I tend to believe that there's indeed a large profit margin asked for e-readers that are decent, while the basic ones are priced well!

It's the same with cellphones,
If you want an android phone, you'll need at least 4GB of RAM, and at least 32GB of internal memory.
You can find plenty of phones with 32GB of memory, and 2 or 3GB of ram, from $30-$200, but the 4GB RAM versions almost all come with 64GB of ROM; with a price of $500 or up.
And you know that the 3GB of RAM will be limiting you someway or another (and isn't future proof).
Not even sure why they make them? (as some of the 2GB phones would work well, if they had just 4GB of RAM instead! which would be like $50+an additional $10 for the memory = $60).
Probably they're licensing agreements between companies that don't want to undermine the high end market, by budget phones that could perfectly do the job if their bottleneck was taken care of.

Not even sure why they make devices with built in, non replaceable batteries?
Does it cost them that much to install a water sealed hatch in the back?

Same with motorcycles. The sweet spot for USA is 400-500cc.
Until a few years ago, there were 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, and 300cc motorcycles.
In other words, not enough for the interstate.
Then it would jump to 700cc (the 600cc sports bike from Suzuki, was hugely popular).
Then Honda came out with their 500cc bikes, unfortunately they made them too heavy.
Still to this day, there's no small, light weight, hi-rev 400cc motorcycle on the market (save for the KTM Duke 390, which has reliability issues)...

Anyway, I guess it's what you pay for luxury.
I wished they would do the same as with PCs.
They probably some day will get there.
PCs have sufficient power. You pay for the surplus on power that you don't really need.
Like,
A 2,9Ghz Corei5 laptop of $500 with 4-8GB of RAM, will work well for most things I want to do. But if I want a 12 core Xeon, it'll become $+1500, or a 300% increase.

The luxury of power in the PCs is purchased in money.
Most of the time you won't need the extra power of a server processor, and actually benefit from the longer battery life of the lower end model. So in PC terms, we would most of the time benefit with the lower model which lasts longer in battery, costs less, and still is good enough to be future proof for the next 4+ years!

Cars, if all you're looking for, is a vehicle that gets you from point a to b, in a reasonable comfortable fashion, most econocars are great deals, costing half the price of the ones that do the same, but with fun riding.
I do think that factories could bump up the fun factor, and make luxury and performance/exotic cars more expensive; but lower the street price of current sporty
(200-350HP) cars.
I do find they surplus charge too much to the mid class, while the upperclass is no longer buying them (they're more into Ferraris and Lamborghinis etc...)...

Cellphones are almost there.
The mid class needs to be upgraded significantly, and the upper class needs to aim for gamers.

The ebook class is still a few years, to a decade behind in this.
We should get Oasis' performance, at a Kindle PPW pricepoint.
Our readers should all have 7 to 9 inch screens, even if they had a lower resolution (800x600 pixels might be good enough), and leave the top models being 7-9" screens with 1080p or UHD screens...