4 ms·

Someone who orders only a couple a year is probably not loosing a lot of money from not being able to or having a harder time getting them. Even if it's commerc

by detaro 3y ago

Someone who orders only a couple a year is probably not loosing a lot of money from not being able to or having a harder time getting them. Even if it's commercial, 5/y is probably more in the realm of a few individually customized setups. Whereas if you have a complete product designed around an SBC, respinning that is expensive, and a few hundred to a few thousand units is an ugly point where that leads to really high per-unit costs. Whereas if you make millions of a thing, the overall development cost is similar, but spreads over many more units. (EDIT: you also probably aren't using an SBC, for similar-ish reasons: a customized board is saving you money per-unit, and millions is enough to amortize the up-front cost of that and still come out ahead) So the economic perspective IMHO makes a lot of sense.

pipo234 3y ago
So his rationale is: 3000/y is big enough to have a real business around, yet too small to invest in alternative SBC?
- pyb 3y ago
  People get into incredible mental contorsions to justify helping one customer who should really be able to find alternatives, over helping 1000+ customers who cannot.
- detaro 3y ago
  Pretty much. Much larger products are also more likely to not use an SBC in the first place, so naturally the majority of the products needing Pis urgently are in that smaller range. Of course you also have large companies making low-volume products using Pis, where I guess one could argue more that those companies should be able to take the hit of temporarily not being able to make as many as they'd like. But for smaller companies without large buffers or other business, its a big problem. I'd be curious to what degree they've looked into the exact cases when deciding who to support.
- dbuder 3y ago
  3000y is far too little to do the dev work to bring the software up to par imo the failure to ramp up production is the unforgivable part

by detaro 3y ago

pipo234 3y ago

So his rationale is: 3000/y is big enough to have a real business around, yet too small to invest in alternative SBC?

pyb 3y ago
People get into incredible mental contorsions to justify helping one customer who should really be able to find alternatives, over helping 1000+ customers who cannot.
detaro 3y ago
Pretty much. Much larger products are also more likely to not use an SBC in the first place, so naturally the majority of the products needing Pis urgently are in that smaller range. Of course you also have large companies making low-volume products using Pis, where I guess one could argue more that those companies should be able to take the hit of temporarily not being able to make as many as they'd like. But for smaller companies without large buffers or other business, its a big problem. I'd be curious to what degree they've looked into the exact cases when deciding who to support.
dbuder 3y ago
3000y is far too little to do the dev work to bring the software up to par imo the failure to ramp up production is the unforgivable part