4 ms·

If you're actually interested in figuring this out for yourself instead of attributing it to "marketing," compare and contrast with the situation of the Beagleb

If you're actually interested in figuring this out for yourself instead of attributing it to "marketing," compare and contrast with the situation of the Beaglebone boards. Those came out several years prior to the Raspberry Pi, get plenty of PR and press, have received really good updates through the years, have the direct backing of a major manufacturer, are very open, and have a more conventional SoC design. In short, we're talking about stuff that failed to hold back the Raspberry Pi onslaught even though it existed years before the Pi and even though it addresses the stuff you said you care about. Basically, Pi users want different things than you want, and the Pi people were pretty good at delivering those things. I assume the attention to early education in addition to hackers and makers, and somehow persuading or inspiring some hackers to work on a Debian armhf port with user-friendly features at a time when most people already wanted armhf to just go away and die, were decisive. Those were what really set the Pi apart and served to bring in more and more developers and users. After that's it's a virtuous cycle of more and more content creation and enthusiasm surrounding the platform.

foxfluff 5y ago
Anecdotally, Beagle had zero marketing compared to the Pi. Only hardcore geeks had heard of it, whereas when the Pi came out, "normies" wowed at this "cheap credit card sized computer!" that they saw on the news. In schools and workplaces, you could find plenty of people who had heard of the Pi or even had bought one, but they'd never heard of the alternatives. Plenty of people literally think the Pi was the first SBC too. And Pi quickly ended up on the virtual shelves of mainstream electronics stores (along with the Arduinos); the alternatives never came (the only one I remember seeing is the Asus Tinkerboard which I guess has all the marketing power of Asus behind it so that's not too unexpected), and you still have to shop for them on Ebay/Ali*/whatever.
- justin66 5y ago
  > Anecdotally, Beagle had zero marketing compared to the Pi. Only hardcore geeks had heard of it, whereas when the Pi came out, "normies" wowed at this "cheap credit card sized computer!" that they saw on the news. I remember those times, and I'm not sure how to quantify this stuff, and it's not like I know about marketing in general. But... I'm not sure the Pi had more marketing. I'm very sure it had more effective marketing. It seems to me like there are probably some lessons there if somebody wanted to dig into it. I mean honestly, the Pi guys were like a handful of Cambridge people with no money and an in with Broadcom in the beginning. I'm pretty sure I found out about the Beagle from none other than Texas Instruments. It seems to me like the one-offs, clones, and general other stuff that came after Pi and Beagle are deliberately targeting the Beagle-type people rather than the Pi-type people, and there are just fewer of those people. All the industrial sales of Pi hardware suggest that once you've grown the user base beyond a certain point, you can target the Pi-type people all day long and the hackers and industrial customers will hop on board because they value the volume of what you're producing.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    Yea, part of it is that for some reason various sources picked up the news about the Pi and it spread very very fast to (relatively) mainstream media. I never witnessed that kind of phenomenon with the other boards (not even arduino.. I have no idea how that got so popular). I wonder how much that kind of exposure can be attributed to luck and just being at the right place at the right time?
    - justin66 5y ago
      > I wonder how much that kind of exposure can be attributed to luck and just being at the right place at the right time? First, I think we need to credit that the different message the Pi offered (this is a tool for educating kids and goofing around, as well as hacking and making and higher education) and the different mission they took on helped generate enthusiasm. People like the OP are indifferent to the message and the mission, and that is fine, but they assume everyone shares their priorities and get confused by the evidence to the contrary. No idea about luck, but being in the right place at the right time always helps. Stuff like Beagle and Arduino and embedded linux paved the way before them to a certain extent.
  - megous 5y ago
    Lots of clones are targetting "Pi people" One giveaway is "Pi" in the name. Other is having a similar now familiar PCB format. And there were/are a ton of them: Lichee Pi, Bannana Pi, Orange Pi, FriendlyARM Nano Pi, Olimex stuff, Pine64, Libretech boards, Firefly boards, Radxa ROCK Pi, Hardkernel ODROIDs,... And many more. All either have Pi in name or have copied Rpi form factor. I think Rpi has the "first mover" advantage too, other than good marketing and very well funded foundation. Also early cooperation with large component suppliers surely helped a lot. One of the marketing tricks is that whenever someone talks about alternatives, someone will always come and state "oh, but community, and support is much better for Rpis" without knowing anything/very little about the other alternatives. All the diferences for normal use are abstracted away by OS. Anyone can blink their LEDs, drive I2C/SPI, use USB, etc. pretty much the same on all those boards. Only major difference is "how I'll boot this?" and "where I'll get kernel updates/is it mainline?" If that's figured out, it's possible to run any uptodate ARM distro on any of these boards. And that's how it always was.

foxfluff 5y ago

Anecdotally, Beagle had zero marketing compared to the Pi. Only hardcore geeks had heard of it, whereas when the Pi came out, "normies" wowed at this "cheap credit card sized computer!" that they saw on the news. In schools and workplaces, you could find plenty of people who had heard of the Pi or even had bought one, but they'd never heard of the alternatives. Plenty of people literally think the Pi was the first SBC too. And Pi quickly ended up on the virtual shelves of mainstream electronics stores (along with the Arduinos); the alternatives never came (the only one I remember seeing is the Asus Tinkerboard which I guess has all the marketing power of Asus behind it so that's not too unexpected), and you still have to shop for them on Ebay/Ali*/whatever.

justin66 5y ago
> Anecdotally, Beagle had zero marketing compared to the Pi. Only hardcore geeks had heard of it, whereas when the Pi came out, "normies" wowed at this "cheap credit card sized computer!" that they saw on the news. I remember those times, and I'm not sure how to quantify this stuff, and it's not like I know about marketing in general. But... I'm not sure the Pi had more marketing. I'm very sure it had more effective marketing. It seems to me like there are probably some lessons there if somebody wanted to dig into it. I mean honestly, the Pi guys were like a handful of Cambridge people with no money and an in with Broadcom in the beginning. I'm pretty sure I found out about the Beagle from none other than Texas Instruments. It seems to me like the one-offs, clones, and general other stuff that came after Pi and Beagle are deliberately targeting the Beagle-type people rather than the Pi-type people, and there are just fewer of those people. All the industrial sales of Pi hardware suggest that once you've grown the user base beyond a certain point, you can target the Pi-type people all day long and the hackers and industrial customers will hop on board because they value the volume of what you're producing.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  Yea, part of it is that for some reason various sources picked up the news about the Pi and it spread very very fast to (relatively) mainstream media. I never witnessed that kind of phenomenon with the other boards (not even arduino.. I have no idea how that got so popular). I wonder how much that kind of exposure can be attributed to luck and just being at the right place at the right time?
  - justin66 5y ago
    > I wonder how much that kind of exposure can be attributed to luck and just being at the right place at the right time? First, I think we need to credit that the different message the Pi offered (this is a tool for educating kids and goofing around, as well as hacking and making and higher education) and the different mission they took on helped generate enthusiasm. People like the OP are indifferent to the message and the mission, and that is fine, but they assume everyone shares their priorities and get confused by the evidence to the contrary. No idea about luck, but being in the right place at the right time always helps. Stuff like Beagle and Arduino and embedded linux paved the way before them to a certain extent.
- megous 5y ago
  Lots of clones are targetting "Pi people" One giveaway is "Pi" in the name. Other is having a similar now familiar PCB format. And there were/are a ton of them: Lichee Pi, Bannana Pi, Orange Pi, FriendlyARM Nano Pi, Olimex stuff, Pine64, Libretech boards, Firefly boards, Radxa ROCK Pi, Hardkernel ODROIDs,... And many more. All either have Pi in name or have copied Rpi form factor. I think Rpi has the "first mover" advantage too, other than good marketing and very well funded foundation. Also early cooperation with large component suppliers surely helped a lot. One of the marketing tricks is that whenever someone talks about alternatives, someone will always come and state "oh, but community, and support is much better for Rpis" without knowing anything/very little about the other alternatives. All the diferences for normal use are abstracted away by OS. Anyone can blink their LEDs, drive I2C/SPI, use USB, etc. pretty much the same on all those boards. Only major difference is "how I'll boot this?" and "where I'll get kernel updates/is it mainline?" If that's figured out, it's possible to run any uptodate ARM distro on any of these boards. And that's how it always was.