But any sane design would offload the IO to a more capable MCU that has more than a single SPI channel, among other weird limitations.. Sure, hobbyists often do weird things, but the niche for RPi is pretty much 'basically a computer, but you could theoretically blink an LED' - the actual experience of using those peripherals is much worse that what you'd have in Arduino or Platformio. Try attaching an interrupt handler to a GPIO pin on Linux, now you need to write a kernel module :)
ESP32/ESPHome may have taken over the lower end with its easy config but there's still no real Pi competitor. A decade after the first RPi release, I still dread using any other platform when I have to design a board that requires more compute than an ESP32.
The irony here is that other SOC/SBC makers are focused more on throwing a barely stable design onto AliExpress for $20 than investing in good upstream support that would allow them to charge a premium.
Raspberry Pi wasn't always able to charge a premium, that benefit came from years of investment into software and community. I have not yet seen another SOC vendor or board partner realize this in any significant way.
Besides the price, anyway.
This is their latest "High performance industrial grade embedded computer" that I can see on their website
Of course you'll have good upstream support for something as old as the i.MX6UL, it's been out for 8 years (7 years at the time they released the TS-7250-V3).
No wonder Raspberry Pi has upended the market, when a single core Cortex-A7 is the competition.
Even an Allwinner chip that has a terrible BSP at release has good upstream support 7 years later.
I disagree. The NXP (i.MX line) and the TI (am62x) and the STM32 MP1/2 all have good mainline support.
What you say is true of most of the Chineese chips and of mobile chips but if you go with mainstream suppliers targeting the industrial / automative markets these days mainline Linux support is good at the SoC level. At the SoM level some are better than others but it's not that hard to pull the approriate DTS into your mainline kernel build even if it isn't already upstream.
RPi is probably better for hobbyists but that's not due to the mainline status but a community more in tune with hobbyists than the more industrial products.
I've built professional embedded Linux systems based in i.MX5/6/8 and STM32MP1 with mainline based BSP rather than vendor stuff but have only ever used the RPi for one off tools.
I honestly think that's where most of the demand is. It's an aspirational product, like a jacket you could theoretically go up a mountain in or a watch that works underwater or whatever.
That said, if you’re rolling a DIY remotely manageable industrial automation project? It’s the obvious choice.
Hard to beat being able to apt-get openssh, python, etc. etc. and the ecosystem of pluggable hats for just this purpose.
https://roboticsbackend.com/raspberry-pi-gpio-interrupts-tut...
This is testament on how out of touch they are.
The entire ARM ecosystem is far more mature than RISC-V, plus the main RPis are ARM so they have experience with it and probably access to ARM people.
The main reasons to use RISC-V currently are cost and customisability. There are also some quite high quality open source RISC-V cores you can use off the shelf.
If you just want to buy a chip and put it on your own board you don't really care that much about the ISA as long as the toolchain, bootloader, kernel support is there and stable (which is pretty much the case with RISC-V now).
But if you're desiging your own silicon the ability to make or modify an existing open source RISC-V implementation can give you the flexibility that currenlty only the very largest players in the ARM ecosystem that have architecture licenses have (I think that's pretty much limited to Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung).
I expect the smaller but important players like NXP, ST, TI will be bringing out RISC-V chips taking advantage of this.
ARM have also been talking about making their fees dependant on the price of the final product so that could also push people to RISC-V, not just to pay less but also to not have to jump through the hoops that would be required to provide all the information to do that.
The ESP32 supports all of those protocols and Wifi and Bluetooth, and it has low power sleep modes. And there are RISC-V versions which is quite nice from a a warm fuzzy point of view.
I think RPi still has a place for hobby electronics projects where you want GPIO. I don't think people are going to use it as a standard computer (desktop / media server / etc) though.