Interesting. Personally I find the $OFFICIAL_IDE repulsive, and strongly prefer just writing the code in $MY_IDE, with a Makefile on the side. OTOH I find the "branded" hardware attractive: it's a known quality in an ecosystem that I sometimes find complex and confusing, and I greatly appreciate the work they've put into making the whole process more approachable. Of course I have a couple clone boards at hand, but I will buy branded Arduino by default precisely because I instinctively associate the brand with less hassle.
<Insert famous HN comment on why Dropbox is a useless business idea, when you can do that with a self hosted FTP server[1] >
If you know what a Makefile is, then you're not Arduino's target market, but there are millions of people out there who want to turn a relay ON when some sensor gets too hot for some garage project, without first learning about Makefiles or registers.
I am arduino targey market and I know makefiles, I hate them with a passion. One must know his enemies better than he knows himself
Many eaons ago I used to have EE labs in university based on the Atmega chip but using a commercial IDE-compiler, and boy was that a giant PITA as a young buck, having to read dozens of datasheet pages, calculate by hand all the register values just to get a bloody 1 ms PWM timer output on a pin, which never worked the first time and needed an oscilloscope to debug.
"Oh, you did everything right, but forgot to flip the bit of the correct pin of the output port in the right registry, have fun debugging it for the next 3 hours."
And we used "modern" C, not AVR assembly (which is still nice and quite simple to understand once you get the hang of it, don't get me wrong).
The fact that you can do that with 2 simple lines of code, from an API, from a library, that's well tested and guaranteed to work, without an expensive commercial toolchain and HW debugger, was the game changer for the hobbyist market.
But this move feels a bit late in the game for them. They should have done this years ago, but now it feels like they squandered their early lead and became sort of irelevant.