The pi foundation was started by a group of Broadcom engineers. If not for that connection, Broadcom would likely have never given them the time of day - they are notoriously bad to deal with if you are a small company.
It's possible they see this as some sort of marketing, but I don't think they are using it to drive a sales funnel of low-volume customers.
The first Pi was based off a failed set-top streaming box SoC that Broadcom didn't know what to do with.
The original goal (remember that?) was to make it a cheap educational Linux system. And it was a nice idea. The cheap sticker price got it noticed compared to the other more expensive (but better supported) ARM single-board computers. And here we are.
I sure as heck don't know what Broadcom's endgame is here either, because like you say they don't even answer your call if you're <100K EAU. So unlike other EVKs that can be used to rip apart and spin into real projects, you're stuck with RPi as a standalone unit.
The chip shortage is hurting everyone, but at least with other SoCs you can find them from multiple sources eventually. Or use a broker if you're desparate.
Yup, Raspberry Pi kind of sucked the oxygen out of the Beaglebone ecosystem. Speedier and cheaper. The Beaglebone has a lot of features that hardcore embedded engineers want (real-time support, eMMC, tons of IO, good platform documentation), but the Raspberry Pi really appealed to the maker crowd. I guess the $25 price difference made a big difference? I never really understood it.
I was a big Beaglebone Black supporter, but figured the winds were blowing towards the Raspberry Pi, so just started using that instead. Now I'm here with the need for several mini Linux boxes and instead I have nothing. Beaglebone Black feels outdated. Raspberry Pi is unobtainium. Unfortunate where the random walk leads.
In a world where TI had been able to get a foothold with hobbyists on the beaglebone, the world might be very different. TI doesn't hate small-volume sales like Broadcom.
The hobbyist market has weirdly strong network effects: we saw this with Arduino, too, which was a lot more expensive than its competitors! I assume there is a measure of influencer marketing here that old-guard tech companies didn't grasp.
10 years ago, the beagleboard was a game changer, though. They are still making beaglebones and beagleboards, both of which are cool, but they are last-generation computers with lots of useful embedded SoC features, while the Pi is a computer first.
Yeah, TI always seemed nice to hobbyists. I think the RPi foundation was just better organized. Beaglebone always felt very scrappy. RPi feels like they have full time employees around to do all the running-the-org stuff. Well run org + OK project > OK org + great project, I suppose.
From my POV the companies were happy to see people experiment with their designs and SoCs but they just didn't have the resources to put the necessary amount of customer support forward.
In my many argumen^H^H^Hdiscussions with RPi users here and elsewhere, the counter-argument for Pi has always been the community support is excellent. And, yes, it is. When you aren't large enough to get a TI or NXP FAE to answer your email then having a robust community is great. But it was built ground-up from all the RPi fans having the object in their hands and little else to do with it.
When TI dropped OMAP I left for Freescale, now NXP. I've been developing on i.MX for well over a decade now and have really enjoyed it. Their foothold in automotive has allowed them to keep growing the line and branching it out in different ways, more so than TI or Broadcom will.
NXP does seem to be the next good vendor of ARM SoCs (i.MX and QorIQ are both pretty impressive lines).
The idea of "community support" is kind of interesting - it clearly had an effect here, but I'm not so sure how they got it. I guess the foundation just made it very easy for people to talk to each other about RPi projects, while TI put you on some forum in a dark corner of their website.
NXP has been doing solid work with ARM for almost 20 years now. Their LPC line, which they had before the Moto/Freescale acquisition, is a solid workhorse set of SoCs. I've done many projects with the LPC17xx (Cortex-M3) family and they all come out pretty great.
And I believe you're right about the community support. The RPi groups have been run by actual owners and enthusiasts, whereas the factory support forums in my experience have been minimally maintained with almost no interaction from anyone at the actual companies.
if broadcom were supplying at below cost as a marketing expenditure it would explain a bunch of things such as why raspberry pi doesn't allow bulk sales but would give them away with magazines
It doesn't, but the foundation does make a loss on the zero as far as I remember (remember reading somewhere..) which is why they never lifted the "one per order" restriction. It's very annoying because I give trainings sometimes and it would be nice to give each participant one.
It's possible they see this as some sort of marketing, but I don't think they are using it to drive a sales funnel of low-volume customers.