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Easy to say, but the reality is that you will be destroyed (or at least threatened) in the marketplace by your competitor who paid 1/4 what you did for an SBC.



If you're actually deploying 250,000 SBCs, I would imagine you could do a lot better than $35 a piece.


You might be surprised.

Remember that boards like the RPi are either loss leaders for the SoC vendor, or a way to offload excess capacity. Their pricing does not necessarily reflect what an actual customer for an actual SBC product will pay, regardless of scale.


You making profits off a charity organization is not the intended purpose of the Raspberry Pi foundation. Not getting 250k of those for your product is working as intended. You also shouldnt open a for profit restaurant cooking stuff you get from the food bank.


If you can't get a Pi in volume, how can your competitor?


The question isn't whether you can or can't, the question is whether your "real" product has a "real" controller board, for values of "real" that conform to the opinion of someone known as "rhinoceraptor" on Hacker News.

A competitor who doesn't worry about such details will have an advantage in many markets.

At one time, the denizens of a site called "Hacker News" might have been expected to grasp this idea intuitively.


You seem to have misunderstood rhinoceraptor's point given the context they've responded to.

The post they responded to said that the Raspberry Pi is unsuitable to all "real products" because they can't buy 250k of them - you might actually be arguing against their definition of "real product"? rhinoceraptor merely pointed out that that isn't the goal of the Raspberry Pi, and one thus should use something else if it doesn't fit the requirements. If that's your situation, your competitors will have the same problem. If it isn't, then "use something else" doesn't apply to you.




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