How much is it?
I don’t think the car brand comparison is a great one. While I get your point, the purpose of using different car brand names is not for confusion but actually to reduce confusion — to clarify which products are targeting a luxury market.
For a counter example, consider how Samsung sells premium and cheap smart phones. The cheap smart phones give Samsung a bad name which might be associated with the higher end offering in the eyes of a consumer.
It’s not fair to compare to Toyota to Lexus because a Lexus is targeting a different customer and making different trade-offs in their product, even though it’s the same company.
The recent Pi chips are heavily modified. They’re becoming less and less like their TV tuner roots. I wouldn’t exactly call it a failed product line either. I thought that IP went into numerous devices.
Some one on the comment section said that
“There’s no innovation here; it uses a Rockchip processor, which is from a Chinese company. Assembling a board with Chinese components isn’t a big deal. I know people who could make an even better board. Innovation would have been if the processor was designed by an Indian company and made entirely in India. But that’s not the case.”
Lol, changing the country of origin doesn’t constitute innovation from a consumer standpoint…
Now if this was using 5nm or chiplit or any of the other buzzwords of the day it could be marketed as innovative in the modern sense of the word.
Realistically there is no innovation left for ARM platforms. They all use the same core schematics. They only control data flow and peripheral IP as a manufacturer, unless they feel like building their own core from the spec (nobody really does that anymore as ARM has been desperately trying to standardize everything). The most “innovation” I’ve seen has come from stubbornness around keeping legacy bus architecture around instead of adopting AXI (even when all the IP they are trying to use already uses AXI and they keep having to make translation hardware).
cost less than 200U$D
More than double the price. Not sure what it’s competing with, but not a pi
I don’t know if it’s still the case but kernel support and related was nearly always an issue when I tested Raspi alternatives for building homebrew robots. OS updates were a gamble and support and documentation was not good to say the least. Raspi also has every HAT you can imagine to extend their capabilities too.
