Comment by justin66
17 days ago
> essentially getting these chips for free
> by getting the most expensive component for free
I get that you're exaggerating, and you perhaps aren't trying to be deceptive by misusing the word "free," but the low markup the RPi guys initially paid to Broadcom does not explain as much as you think it does about the Pi's success. To explain why let's examine something else you're wrong about:
> You could get a lot of different kinds of boards with good Linux support and a not terrible price. Often, a processor vendor would explicitly provide support for these things because it was a good vector for selling chips.
Prior to the Pi you could get one board with good Linux support and a not terrible price from a vendor who provided support because they thought it was a good vector for selling chips. That was the BeagleBoard, from TI. I mean, the BB barely checked all those boxes: the support wasn't very good, it was kind of nonexistent compared to the support community the Raspberry Pi people created. But they sure didn't have to worry about the cost of the CPU.
So back to the original point: getting the CPU "for free" (since we're apparently just saying "free" now when we mean "at cost") wasn't a decisive advantage for the Raspberry Pi people, since the TI people had the same advantage. TI had a few other advantages as well, like a first mover advantage, their own assembly lines, and relationships with everyone who sells electronics components.
TI's support was crap when compared to something like RPi which deliberately targeted newbies, and as far as I remember they didn't have a few amazing people in their community dedicated to making a whole new spin of Debian and supporting it like RPi did. And, you know, PR matters. All that stuff is what made the difference.
> anticompetitive
I guess we're just throwing words around without caring what they mean today for some reason.
> I get that you're exaggerating, and you perhaps aren't trying to be deceptive by misusing the word "free," but the low markup the RPi guys initially paid to Broadcom does not explain as much as you think it does about the Pi's success.
Broadcom sold the chips to the Raspberry Pi organization at a significant loss, not at a low markup or at cost. They were not free, but they were close to free. The TI guys never even gave anything close to "at cost" to the BeagleBoard folks.
Also, the BeagleBoard was the most hobbyist-targeted and the one with the best PR. There were, and still are, tens of companies making SBCs, but before the RPi they would all sell you singe unit quantity. Not any more. Most of them actually had better support than TI. The NXP boards in general were and still are my favorites.
Also, providing a product at a loss so that it significantly undercuts your competition (also called "dumping") is very much anticompetitive. I don't like using the term for Raspberry Pi because they clearly weren't out to create a monopoly, but the Raspberry Pi was dumping a product.
> Broadcom sold the chips to the Raspberry Pi organization at a significant loss, not at a low markup or at cost. They were not free, but they were close to free. The TI guys never even gave anything close to "at cost" to the BeagleBoard folks.
Everything in that paragraph is “citation needed,” unfortunately, but I certainly don’t mean that in a negative way. I wasn’t aware that Broadcom lost money on the early Pi parts and I feel a little skepticism about that. You seem to know something about what TI charged the Beaglebone people, I’m curious about that as well.
It’s not that dumping parts to establish a competitive advantage is beneath Broadcom - what’s beneath Broadcom? It just seems rather… prescient of them? Unless you were talking about the Pi 3 generation or something. I’d be more inclined to believe that.
On the point of PR, I don’t remember Beagleboard having anything comparable to Pi’s seemingly organic enthusiasm twelve or thirteen years ago. But I guess I’m not sure I would remember.
That’s not all meant to be some kind of RPi love letter. They were great at all that community building stuff, and in my view the best at it, but in light of the IPO it’s quite a joke.
Is there any reliable source for this? It's an interesting claim, but I'm skeptical because I don't think anyone had any idea what a huge success RPi would be. The idea that it was all a monopoly play by Broadcom is something that I'd need more evidence to believe.
It's not a monopoly play by broadcom originally. It was a way to get rid of excess stock of a chip that was going obsolete (without just tossing them) while doing something good for computer engineering education. I don't think anyone expected this to get so big.
Subsequent chips were specially made for the Pi by broadcom, and supposedly they didn't have as large of margins as other customers.
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I had very much the same feeling. Not because Broadcom are nice guys, but because it just doesn't sync with what everyone thought they knew at the time.
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> you perhaps aren't trying to be deceptive by misusing the word "free," but the low markup the RPi guys
You perhaps aren't trying to be deceptive by misusing the word "markup," but citation please for /any/ "markup the RPi guys initially paid to Broadcom"
Huh. If I knew what their markup was, I would not have asked pclmulqdq for more information about what their markup was. Or what their markup wasn't, if pclmulqdq is right and Broadcom gave them the chips at a "significant loss."
> Huh. If I knew what their markup was, I would not have asked pclmulqdq for more information about what their markup was
Regardless, any basis of your "low markup" would suffice to show markup was non-zero.
...though given this is HN I would have to concede low could be zero! :)