Which is the vicious cycle. Design a board using a phone or networking chip for a production run of 1000, then the value is going to be worse than a commodity p

Which is the vicious cycle. Design a board using a phone or networking chip for a production run of 1000, then the value is going to be worse than a commodity part. Which means no one is going to buy them. If the phone/networking chip were designed upfront to to be less cost optimized for its target market (say putting graphics on a networking chip, or more PCIe lanes on a phone soc) that would help. As would assuming your going to sell 100k of them, and assuring the design and pricing is competitive with a $300 x86 motherboard+cpu combination. The honeycomb could be a good board, but its obvious they have designed it for some target market that isn't actually a generic mITX board. The CEX, and x4 SFP cages add cost, but little value vs a desktop board so you have a board that costs $800 and competes poorly with $150 AMD boards that take AM4 processors unless you happen to need 4 ports of 10G ethernet. The honeycomb minus all the networking junk would be selling in the hundreds of thousands of units if it were $100 to $250. The rpi doesn't sell millions of units because its good, its sells that many because its $50. So really the "flaw" is all the extreme upfront cost cutting to create a product that is laser focused at a single big fish customer, then failing to provide a generic and flexible version for the open market that can be customized less expensively.