Their goal was never to be in the hardware business, Eben's goal was to expand coding understanding in the UK.

This is actually the key. From their website "The Raspberry Pi is a tiny and affordable computer that you can use to learn programming through fun, practical projects."

It's about learning programming through fun, practical projects. CoderDojo is a foundation that shares the same goal. RaspberryPi is essentially one way or tool used to promote learning to code.

With this merger, Ebon can get a better understanding of the struggles people have and perhaps create other ways to help people learn to code.

> Why would they step away from this?

There's a lot more supply in the $35 SBC market than when they started.

Sure, but not many have gobs of documentation, regularly updated OS distros, and a rabid community of coders, makers, educators, etc. That Raspi B you bought five years ago is still supported by the latest Raspbian releases. Not many other boards will have that kind of long-term support.

Until there's a (well adopted) common platform standard for these ARM-based boards, the Raspberry Pi Foundation must continue to develop their hardware. Unless... perhaps Eben and Co could work on that standard, and its adoption, as part of their goals.

The problem is that the entire ARM economy tends to have rather spotty support as a whole. There are mountains of proprietary peripherals baked into the chips, so you can't just pick and choose better supported options like you can on PCs with removable parts.

And while a chip manufacturer may make a handful of refreshes, most ARM platforms tend to only last a few years before being completely abandoned in favor of new ones. I am frankly amazed they can still get the BCM2835.

You can already do that but even better, and with an actual x86 computer. I bought some of these when they were $80

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Fanless-Ubuntu-14-0-4-Comput...

plus a battery usb battery pack.

https://hackernoon.com/diy-kubernetes-cluster-with-x86-stick... used these to setup my own k8s cluster

> but I dream of the day when I can carry my whole computer in my pocket and be able to use it anywhere.

Have you tried the compute stick[1]?

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-c...

Is there something like this with a battery that can make it through an entire day? (Needs to run linux)

2amp powerbank ? Compute stick can run Linux (Ubuntu) or Windows depending on which you get...

Making hardware and software for it is hard and doesn't bring in money. Going this route they can rise salaries for administration.