Everything in that paragraph is “citation needed,” unfortunately, but I certainly don’t mean that in a negative way. I wasn’t aware that Broadcom lost money on the early Pi parts and I feel a little skepticism about that. You seem to know something about what TI charged the Beaglebone people, I’m curious about that as well.
It’s not that dumping parts to establish a competitive advantage is beneath Broadcom - what’s beneath Broadcom? It just seems rather… prescient of them? Unless you were talking about the Pi 3 generation or something. I’d believe that.
On the point of PR, I don’t remember Beagleboard having anything comparable to Pi’s seemingly organic enthusiasm twelve or thirteen years ago. But I guess I’m not sure I would remember.
That’s not all meant to be some kind of RPi love letter. They were great at all that community building stuff, and in my view the best at it, but in light of the IPO it’s quite a joke.
Subsequent chips were specially made for the Pi by broadcom, and supposedly they didn't have as large of margins as other customers.
For me, its beaten by the more effective claim Broadcom sold it /at/ cost.
Broadcom sold the chips to the Raspberry Pi organization at a significant loss, not at a low markup or at cost. They were not free, but they were close to free. The TI guys never even gave anything close to "at cost" to the BeagleBoard folks.
Also, the BeagleBoard was the most hobbyist-targeted and the one with the best PR. There were, and still are, tens of companies making SBCs, but before the RPi they would all sell you singe unit quantity. Not any more. Most of them actually had better support than TI. The NXP boards in general were and still are my favorites.
Also, providing a product at a loss so that it significantly undercuts your competition (also called "dumping") is very much anticompetitive. I don't like using the term for Raspberry Pi because they clearly weren't out to create a monopoly, but the Raspberry Pi was dumping a product.