In reply to a post by broadband66:

Schools use these to educate children in the art of programming and are cheap as chips.

Might get them to design a GUI that is better than W8 and variants.

Schools already have PCs which the kids can program on, these are simply spending money on something they could have done with existing equipment, which would be superior anyway.

In reply to a post by micksharpe:

Why, then, did they switch from the SD format to micro-SD when they designed the Pi 2? They are amazingly easy to mislay and impossible to identify. Gah!

They didn't - the switch occurred when the Pi B+ came out, followed by the A+ and then the Pi2B

It incurs a cost for those making the change, but avoids the problems with the SD connector (I've had to have three changed, so far, for a more rugged connector - but this still leaves a vulnerability point where a dropped Pi with SD card plugged in can break the SD card (quite easily)

Thanks for that. I always wondered why they made the change. Now, if only they would move to a USB 3.0 bus. Apparently, the developers are not interested since it would mean using a different SoC. Still, I love this little device.

From what I've read, the designers try to balance cost and performance. I think they did a good job with that. The added cost to redo the whole thing for usb3.0 was probably balanced against the number of benefits.
I personally have no usb 3.0 stuff yet

A USB 3.0 bus would be really sweet. Running external disk drives limits their speed to around 35 megabytes per second. Also, the ethernet interface is run off the USB bus which is why gigabit ethernet is not supported. I'm not sure how the SD card is connected but I wouldn't be surprised if it is hung off the USB bus as well. I imagine that the real reason is that Broadcom do not want to make more powerful chips available to a charitable organisation, but the RPi foundation is not allowed to say so.