"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To some extent I agree with you, but I don't think this is a good example.

These types of "computers" are pretty simple electronics. All the complexity lives inside the "System on chip" - the engineer then picks a few supporting chips and makes sure the signal routing is matched. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing is based on a reference design from the SoC designer.

In this case, the west basically already competes - this is pretty similar to the raspberry pi zero. There's plenty of Western designed SoCs - which is where the complexity and IP lie.

All those SBCs are copying the Raspberry Pi range. But they go all in on hardware and tend to be lacking on the software and documentation sides compared to the various Pi.

For example, the Pi Pico comes with nice SDKs, comprehensive documentation, and can be flashed with a simple file drag and drop as they made it show as an USB drive.

So I'd say the West is still leading on this...

I don't think there is enough of a desire in the west to waste time pumping out non-innovative low spec trash. They follow the manta of "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." For everything else, there is China after all.

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