But I can’t understand what are the use cases to be selling 73M units.
Would anyone mind sharing what are the broadly applicable use cases, because selling 73M units is well beyond hobbyist fun.
6 months ago, I also started experimenting with Raspberry Pi, and now I am working on a Chromecast alternative for businesses called Soljacast using RPi. My device can work as digital signage, or a casting device for co-workings and event companies that use computers at events for presentations.
I am also using it to build a personal companion AI device with a screen, sort of like an Amazon Echo Show but with Microsoft's Clippy in there. So I am sure people are building even more complex stuff than me.
Here is a video of how my device is being used at a local exhibition venue: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FF3I9EOs4AA
There are smart parking garage lights, smart inspection cameras, smart golf ball dispensers... all these things have enough margin they can absorb a 100-300% component increase, though I'm sure they don't like it.
Pi - 73 million sold
ESP32 - 1 billion sold
STM32 - 13 billion sold
For every 1 Pi sold, there’s almost 200 STM32s sold.
Firstly, Pis and SBCs like it tend to be fully functional OOBE on their own. This has useful properties but also means that hooking them up and testing their use is a little bit simpler even compared to a microcontroller dev board
Secondly, it's a full Linux ecosystem and all of that that it entails. This ecosystem has more in it than these ecosystems (especially in the FOSS world) and it's also useful for projects that exceed a few MB of RAM. Sure if I want to do a few things a microcontroller like this is a very very good and probably the better option (it isn't that difficult to write a lil C to control these things) but SBCs can do lot more than that while still keeping many of the advantages, which may be the difference in some cases
25% Enthusiasts and education 75% Industrial and embedded