Comment by mastazi
7 days ago
You seem to equate gateway product = affordable but, IMHO, a gateway product is something that people who are not in the field are likely to stumble upon. I recently saw Arduino kits for kids at a small local bookstore, I can imagine someone thinking "hey this electronic thingy looks cool I'll buy one for my niece's birthday". On the flip side, people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.
>people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.
But high chance they will look it up on Amazon/Ebay/whatever e-store and buy a clone without knowing.
This has 100% been my experience, even with in-person shopping.
You ask for an Arduino, and the follow up question is: 'genuine or generic?'.
I don't think the Arduino trademark is that valuable, it's already well underway genericization.
I think a key part of a gateway product is community. That is what Arduino has, and what RPi has. It can also exist separate to products (e.g. micropython)