Most of the SoCs in the article were already several years old when it was written. The article focuses on parts that are (relatively speaking) easily solderable by hand. Most new SoCs focus on small size and will come in 0.5mm pitch BGA packages or smaller, where PCBs start becoming sharply more expensive and placement requires a decent amount of skill.

> My all time favorite SoM was the CHIP Pro, but sadly at $7 (or was it $13?) it was indeed too good to be true and the company went out of business.

The CHIP was just a cheap board based on the Allwinner R8, which is basically an Allwinner A13, which is in the same product family as the Allwinner A33 in the article.

There are actually a lot of cheap SBCs based on the cheap Allwinner parts out there. The CHIP had great execution and some novel in-browser upgrade features, but I don't know how they planned to make money by selling things basically at cost. Apparently they didn't have any idea either, because they spontaneously went out of business and disappeared.

Wasnt CHIP run only to take Chinese development funds, thus selling at cost wasnt a problem for them.

Do you mean: have new readily-available parts been introduced in the wake of the current supply shortages? The answer is no.

I have a pile of them in my drawer, as many as I could get my hands on (maybe 8 or 12?)

They're great. In my head they were "something that had the stuff that annoyed me about RaspberryPis fixed".

I should dig some out and see if there's a way to update the OS to something recent-ish.

I think I've still got a cluster of 4 of them, 3 running RTL SDR and one analysing the signals and pulling interesting data out. (Last data file I have here from that is Dec 2018...)