Comment by pclmulqdq
19 days ago
> 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.
Is there evidence that Broadcom sold those chips to the foundation for less than their own cost? That’s the claim I find a little strong. And I do understand that undercutting other nonprofit or small vendors might also be considered bad behavior, but it never sounded like there was a lot of demand for those particular chips (which were already on the edge of obsolescence, and were even in the process of being abandoned by Debian).
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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.
> it just doesn't sync with what everyone thought they knew at the time.
Such as?