There’s also a good amount of problems involved in having a non-auditable (non certified) piece of firmware running in a coprocessor that handles communications, and being closed source and Chinese doesn’t help.
The difference is generally that the maker space doesn’t need to be production ready.
By the way, Murata has modules on the ~6$ range (depending on what features you want)
Every chipmaker in China has a 10 year 100% income tax subsidy. Some of the earliest subsidy recipients are now passing that period, so they invented new schemes which are to the effect the same except for "go to technology park A, or factory park B."
Given this is an income tax, companies don't benefit much themselves if they are working on low margins, but it helps to lure in more companies who got themselves into stockmarket play.
As it is China, another factor is that company owner who is a sole shareholder/board head/CEO would've been taxed to oblivion if he were to simply give himself a giant salary to extract profits (60%-70%.)
When it all began, dividends were completely tax free, and there were no capital gains tax. Now they aren't, but the policy somehow continues to drive on the same rails.
They were already mass produced and available as factory leak/direct sale/replacement parts at dimes apiece, then were picked up by the guy who ported Arduino Core to it when he was looking for anything small and cheap that has Wi-Fi and are reprogrammable.
It could have been some Sierra Wireless UMTS or Intel Wi-Fi bgn or CSR Bluetooth, but the easiest he could tap onto was an 8266. I remember there was a guy showing demo doing what today one would do with M5Stack done on a classic miniPCI card in Maker Faire Tokyo like a decade ago, except notably the logo on the guy’s badge and laser etching on the chip kind of looked similar so that kind of future could have been possible but never materialized. Similarly I still have couple “Zero Channel RAID” cards somewhere that I dreamed of turning them into what Raspberry Pi is today. So a lot of these opportunities exist/ed but are/were neglected for the lack of interest to get over a chasm. Perhaps modern day equivalents to them are DRAM cached SSDs, some of them smell like penguins.
That’s not just to makers for sure.
https://www.espressif.com/en/news/Espressif_Achieves_the_Hun...
Realtek has been selling the rtl8710 for a long time, however it seems like it never really caught on (there have been some experimentations with Rust on it in the hobbyist world, but that's all I know).
https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/07/28/an-alternative-to-es...
http://www.wifimcu.com/ (Lua programmable just as the NodeMCU)
The Western chipmakers are being disrupted with chips that are good enough, not realizing that cheap price creates a new quality, enabling devices not possible before.
Sure, the firmware and SDK had some of bugs and missing features to iron out, but they came a long way since the release and now are solid enough to put devices like Sonoff inside your electrical boxes and walls.
The ESP family is absolutely amazing in terms of price and features, not so much efficeincy wise. It would have been great if RTOS support was better. The ESP-IDF is based on FreeRTOS, NuttX has some preliminary support, RiotOS doesn't do FPU, BT, crypto acceleration and uses one core only. NodeMCU is maker/hobby garde, not an OS and so is Arduino. To be fair, the whole ESP chip family is rather hobby grade but if it works and you're not power constrained or you use it as a secondary MCU and put it to sleep, it should be fine.
As always, patches welcome ;)
Those RTOS projects don't have nearly as much developer resources as there are Chips, so there are always still low hanging fruits to be picked.
To be fair, the esp* chips don't have memory mapped on-chip flash but load the code from external SPI flash to RAM at startup.
While that solution is cheaper (and also faster due to executing from RAM) it adds a small delay at startup powering the large RAM uses more energy.
https://www.espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/...
Greed
Also, we have horrendous price gouging for memory. A mere 128k to 256k bump in memory spec on a microcontroller will send you back a $1.20 in chip price.
Is there some CCP-gov subsidy going on to capture the market? Espressif's ESP32 is such an extraordinary chip with 500kb+ memory and yet, it is an order of magnitude cheaper than anything close from western suppliers. What gives?