[iyulaev]

Hell yeah! If I'm shipping 10M units to my 5 favorite customers, and my documentation comes in Engineer form, I don't want to waste my time writing up 20K pages of documentation (which is about how much it takes) so that hobbyists can buy the chips and then demand support, 5 units at a time.

[marshray]

Who are these 'hobbyists' who 'demand' 20K pages of specially-written documentation?

I suspect there are a lot of professional Engineers working on products that will ship fewer than 10M units. Sometimes these Engineers then go on to design products that ship more than 10M units and prefer to keep working with the chips they know. Sometimes those Engineers are 'hobbyists' too.

[iyulaev]

Some vendors follow your suggested model, and are very open with support and documentation. Other vendors (some of the biggest are in this group) have terrible/non-existent documentation and provide application-specific support by shipping an engineer with the product.

Modern SoCs demand thousands of pages to cover all available features and possible applications, and putting together that documentation in a self-consistent way is a challenge. Some vendors have decided that supporting low-revenue clients is not worth the cost of putting together said general-purpose documentation and providing support to each and every buyer. They'd rather not sell you the product in the first place than sell you something and stiff you on documentation & support, which is a reasonable position.

Often when you're a low-quantity company you deal with low-quantity vendors who are willing to support you. When you move to high volume you might prefer to keep working with the chips you know. But when your operations guy comes back to you and says that the Big Co (who wouldn't talk to you in the past) can sell you chips for $5 less, that's $50M you just saved (given your 10M unit quantity). So you switch. In this example you have two different vendors: high cost / high support, low cost / "exclusive" support. Both have markets, just different ones.

TI is an example of a vendor that is very hobbyist / small quantity friendly. Even that wasn't enough to save them - they've pulled out of the phone SoC business.

[marshray]

I recall going to TI's site regularly over a period of months looking at OMAP chips in small quantities and finding them continually backordered. I know some people got dev kits. Ultimately, they were just an another ARM licensee with a GPU of questionable utility (to me).