oskda
Very Active Member
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2015
- Messages
- 375
There simply was no single-board computer market to dominate, the market itself was still a niche.
Sometimes the best time to begin domination is when that market starts up. For example Microsoft conquered IBM/compatible PC market from beginning (after tricking IBM). If MS had started its OS years after IBM PC market (obviously PC would have used other OS from begining), things could be different.
The price wasn't even the unique selling point of the first RPi, there were quite a few similarly priced boards already at that time. What made the RPi special was its hardware video decoders, as the SoC was basically designed to be used in video recorders. There simply was no other similar board out there that was able to play h.264 FullHD ...
The price was the best selling point (think IP was give free to RPI Foundation), but there were more points, for example it was some official support for education on UK, etc. All that points feed back, so RPI market was bigger and bigger, and this was also was the best point: each time it was bigger there were more support from people/community (you could find all type of projects) and that feeds back.
I think being able to play H.264 FHD was irrelevant for most projects, or at least a very big part of them, and so not very relevant for RPI success.
In fact I think that RPI SOC being mainly a video SOC (CPU cores were secondary to video/GPU) was worse point of RPI. It was chosen because it was simple old and for free/"charity" (although it could be there was not so "charity" but other interests).
PD: I don't want to argue more on RPI, as it would be off-topic. Lets focus on Pyra
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