[luma]

The problem with rPi is storage and filesystem. You need to issue a shutdown command and wait for it to complete before removing power in order to help ensure that it will come up without problems. This will literally never happen with a consumer IoT device. Also, SD media is extremely prone to failure.

It's fine for prototype at a very early stage, absolutely not fine for something you ship to a user.

[TickleSteve]

You would typically use a read-only filesystem in an embedded system, not the default raspbian style distro. This allows you to a) not require a clean shutdown and b) saves your physical media from writes.

[incanus77]

This. Check out https://balena.io as one example.

[nyanpasu64]

Ironically today, for embedded hardware projects, it would be a perfectly fine idea to use a Raspberry Pi... Pico microcontroller.

[nereye]

On the other hand, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33892009, https://www.raspberrypi.com/success-stories/korg-synthesizer... for example on how some companies use Raspberry Pi compute modules in their products.

Am assuming here that they're adopting strategies to minimize/work around the problems you mention.

[enlightens]

The computer module instead of the standard Pi is the first step of those strategies. It doesn't use the SD card (in fact the data sheet gives details on how to configure the OS if you won't be shutting it down before removing power) and the device as a whole requires smaller electrical current that the standard device.