focalist:
They also have no other device they claim is the "real thing". Why wouldn't you go for the higher priced Mega? Leonardo? I mean, if you are going to steal, make it worth it, you know? So strange.
Couple things.
I think they have production lines using and warehouses full of older parts they're selling off cheap just to hit certain marks on production economies. Tooling and setting up is expensive. You gotta complete so many runs to pay that off. What can I say? I wrote estimation and bidding packages back when we still made things here, made fixtures and jigs, set up and worked parts myself.
That was in a job shop where a shorts run was 10's of something. The real gains are in the millions+ and thinking way down the road.
But what a lot of places don't think about is change, often for the sake of change as much as anything regardless of market rhetoric. The old stuff that does what it always did and suits a huge range of tasks becomes a matter of fashion whether it's clothes, cars or chips.
One reason I got into Arduino instead of using the money to upgrade my PC is because Arduino is simple and I liked my time with simpler computing and know it has value. I can program a 328P with an UNO and use that same DIP 328P all on it's lonesome to do amazing things for cheap.
I also think that the language and culture barrier West to East does count. Let them know with some tact and they may change the labeling. How many things of theirs have we grabbed onto labels and used without knowing the full significance? Probably more than we know if we include corporate interactions. As a country we can't even get terms between our own sub-cultures straight much of the time, with predictable (ongoing bigot-test) results, so give them a chance!