Where was this knowledge when the Pi supply was low?
Title says most of it. Spin electric scooters exited the Seattle market and abandoned their scooters all over the city and apparently they have a pi 4 in them!
I mean, the cold reality is that they developed and released a perfect piece of hardware for industrial automation and sold it for pennies in comparison to other industrial computer boards.
Industry will always have deeper pockets than hobbyists.
If you can buy 10 Pis for the cost of one real PLC, and the only downtime you have if it fails is the time to swap the board and boot the machine back up it's a no-brainer solution.
It's not just that. If the Pi Foundation has to make a choice between fulfilling an order for 100 pis for a company so that the company can keep making products and meeting payroll vs. 100 hobbyists that want to make their own one-off project, which is the more moral use of resources?
Yeah, those companies should probably not have chosen a pi board to power their products but that's only noticeable in hindsight.