I asked you, specifically, what it would cost Google to commission LG to build a higher capacity Nexus 4. If you don't know, don't incessantly lecture how inexpensive it would be because you don't actually know, you're speculating.
This question is not answered by this:
I totally agree with you that it is prohibitively expensive. I admit I was wrong all along. I am clearly imagining all these cheap Android devices that have SD.
What it suggests is that because cheap phones have these features, that it is inexpensive to include them. That is a very different statement than, "Once the design and engineering is complete, okay now change the whole thing to have more space, here, here and here and do so without any additional weight, thickness or other changes to dimensions. Then, create an unknown quantify of these in case people want them, even though it's a wildly successful device that's already 8 months old."
Of course it's more expensive to re-engineer the device. If you notice, the $130 Precedent also comes with 2.2, a 3.2" screen with terrible resolution of 320x480, a 2MP camera (on the back, no front camera), and restricted access to the Play Store. That's the no compromise device you want to compare to the Nexus? Perhaps notice that it supports microSD but has less than .5GB internal storage. It does come with a 2GB SD card. In addition to it's single core 800MHz processor and half a gig of RAM, I'm not sure the low cost is only because of the storage options. It only works on one network and one specific plan on that network.
It'd be a sad day indeed if someone chose to spend $130 (it's on sale for $80 now) for that device when they could spend less than double that for a modern device that only has 14GB less possible storage and is vastly superior on every single other feature.
How many millions of dollars, specifically, does it cost to re-engineer the existing N4, refit assembly lines and create how many phones? How many would they sell now that it's 8 months old? What is their margin and does it justify the expense? Who knows? Who cares?