[jsheard]

That's only Pi-like in the sense of being an SBC, unlike the Pi it's meant to be an evaluation/reference platform for integrators who want to build their own board around the SOC, not something you would buy to use for its own sake.

[GuB-42]

But maybe they could make it more Pi-like, that is pricing it so that it can interest both integrators and hobbyists, with a bootloader that makes it easy to tinker with the OS (not necessarily the firmware).

[rbanffy]

I am sure that if the RPi Foundation can do it, Qualcomm can as well.

[jsheard]

Broadcom is the counterpart to Qualcomm in that comparison, and those two have similar attitudes towards the hobbyist/enthusiast market - they don't care in the slightest. It took a entity outside of Broadcom which nonetheless had deep connections to them (Eben Upton was there prior to starting RPi) in order to broker a compromise where the Pi could happen, and even then Broadcom kept most of the documentation tied up in NDAs and the bare SOCs not available for sale to the general public.

The Raspberry Pi is an anomaly that's unlikely to be replicated.

[rbanffy]

And this is where they fail - the people who gets their boards have almost zero interest in upstreaming whatever hardware enablement they do to make the boards sort of work for their specific use cases.

I really don't think undercutting their evaluation board business with affordable SBCs would hurt their bottom line.

[jsheard]

The people who buy those eval boards probably aren't even allowed to upstream whatever they do with it, they'll have signed an NDA with Qualcomm to get access to the documentation.