Yeah audiophile grade mobile players are fucking huge. So unless they made a breakthrough in audio hardware design, that's just not true.

The oldest initial users of the C64 are elderly now. Those folks were adults in the '80s when the machine came out.

And those of us who were kids at the time are now late forties, early fifties or thereabouts. Riiight about the age eyesight starts to go...

It's niche hardware: a smartphone in a flip-phone formfactor (with a headphone jack). Of course they're not producing them for <$100. Ars Technica costed out other phones in a similar market category ( last paragraph here ) and by that standard it's middle-priced, or a bit above.