• j4k3@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    People don’t seem to understand Raspberry Pi’s at all. It is a market manipulation scheme that can not be beat commercially because it is not run like a capitalist enterprise. It is a scheme to prevent bottom up competition from beating Broadcom’s proprietary monopoly of low quality junk. The chips Rπ are selling are off of a trailing edge node with, and are a failed product line of TV tuners. The ARM core of the chip is only 1/4th of the actual die. The chips are made in a fab that only produces them when there is no other paid work. This entire supply chain is barely above cost. The reason Rπ is a foundation and a dot org is because the entire endeavor is a tax write off for Broadcom. The reason it is centered out of the UK is so that it distances public awareness of the scheme. Broadcom has no public documentation of the vast majority of their hardware. Between Qualcomm, that uses the same proprietary business model, and Broadcom, these are the two primary reasons behind why you no longer own your devices in a perpetual cycle of artificial deprecation. This entire scheme is designed to avoid scalability from the bottom up by companies like Rockchip. If this still doesn’t connect in your mind, think of Japanese cars in the USA and abroad. They build high quality low end cars and created value at the bottom first. With time they scaled that value and overtook all segments of the market. They even split up their companies to avoid the perception of their real dominance using Honda = Acura, Toyota = Lexus, and Nissan = Infinity, because the majority of the public is too stupid to see and understand such simple obfuscation measures in practice.

    • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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      5 months ago

      I don’t think the car brand comparison is a great one. While I get your point, the purpose of using different car brand names is not for confusion but actually to reduce confusion — to clarify which products are targeting a luxury market.

      For a counter example, consider how Samsung sells premium and cheap smart phones. The cheap smart phones give Samsung a bad name which might be associated with the higher end offering in the eyes of a consumer.

      It’s not fair to compare to Toyota to Lexus because a Lexus is targeting a different customer and making different trade-offs in their product, even though it’s the same company.

      • j4k3@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        It is marketed as such, but I see that as an insult to my intelligence and a bar with which to measure expectations among my fellow countrypersons.

        My first Samsung phone was very low end from back in the early naughties when they were insignificant. They had far better connection reliability compared to anything else at the time. Samsung’s coup of the market was their investment in cutting edge fab nodes. For Japanese car manufacturers it was the just-in-time supply chain and teams based organization with better pay in the assembly line with a far better distribution of responsibility than the antiquated labor systems that trade unions remained insistent on maintaining due to their simplicity and ineptitude for change even after a superior system is demonstrated.

        If you can objectively think about the timeline of the late 80’s and early 90’s, if monolithic Toyota, Honda, and Nissan dealerships had appeared to completely overtake the American manufacturers in the number of models available, options range across models, and longevity while the total number of sales for these brands far exceeded Chrysler, GM, and Ford, it would be a politically polarizing situation in a country with deeply xenophobic tendencies. Splitting up the brands made the numbers more palatable against the American brands, even though Chrysler was already nothing more than a label on nonunion foreign made goods. This was a political move for the Japanese auto industry and part of the Regan era cutting of the American middle class and labor. It was an admission of our absolute ineptitude across the board; were not smart enough to remain flexible in business and labour; we are not smart enough to understand the complexity of available products like the rest of the more intelligent world. The two paradigms are correlation by an assumed ineptitude that ironically most are still proving if they can not step into the abstract self awareness required to see past the hand holding spin doctor narrative to ask hard questions about their reality and stomach the results objectively.