> The idea that ARM should be used in any/all situations is naive. I mean, sure, this is true. MSP430s are great when you need the lowest power, and AVRs are t

> The idea that ARM should be used in any/all situations is naive. I mean, sure, this is true. MSP430s are great when you need the lowest power, and AVRs are tiny and cheap for lowest cost. But... I do this for a living, and there's a reason our go-to is the Cortex-M series. M3 or M4 if you need a lot of CPU power, or M0/M0+ if you need small. They're just so, so much easier to program that the trivial additional cost of the microcontroller washes away in the noise. And it's not like this leads to Linux toasters; the M0 is not a microprocessor, it's a microcontroller. It's got a two-stage "pipeline" and absolutely no memory protection! There are tricks to get the larger M3s to run Linux, but it's hacky and not something you'd want to ship. PICs are essentially obsolete, and none of us would ever consider them for new development. They're annoyingly constrained hoary old beasts.