Top Raspberry Pi Alternatives in 2019

The Raspberry Pi itself is a bit of a marketing gimmick. They all use Broadcom SoCs, and that's a huge boon to Broadcom. The Raspberry didn't actually start out with Broadcom chips, but once Broadcom got involved they understood the marketing potential, and it's been very good for them.

All of the other SoC manufactures understand how influential the Raspberry has been in selling Broadcom SoCs into embedded applications. Rockchip was slow to the game but they have been pushing pretty hard. I think their first was that Asus Tinkerboard, which I remember being pretty expensive.

I'd be willing to bet their marketing department got some money in the last couple of weeks.

edit: "The brain’s reward center actually stimulates us for successfully detecting patterns, hence their inflated value. In short, patterns are habit-forming. What we fail to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of information which aren’t repeated, because they do not conform to an interesting pattern. "