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Intel Exits the Maker Movement (hackaday.com)
Reader szczys writes: Intel just killed off its last "maker movement" hardware offering without fanfare by quietly releasing a Product Change Notification PDF. The Arduino 101 is halting production on September 17th. This microcontroller board is built around the Intel Curie module around which Intel bankrolled a television series called America's Greatest Makers. News on the end of life for the Arduino 101 board follows the recent cancellations of their Joule, Galileo, and Edison boards. This is the entirety of Intel's maker offerings and seems to signal their exit from entry-level embedded hardware.
It's on its fourth 14nm generation, having its ass handed to them by ARM and AMD and now cutting off niche products like the maker movement, plus it has ME in all new processors.
Intel is used to being the top dog and the one that can simply set the specs and everyone has to dance to their tune. Of course having to take into consideration what others want is not something someone like this wants to deal with.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On a positive note, more are entering the maker space and the market for the internet of things is impressive. Security hopefully will catch up.
I see Intel trying to cut a lot of low return investments to redirect their focus into the processor space. AMD is making serious inroads and actually caught them off guard. McAfee appears to have been a misstep, although I could have called that one a light year a way.
As soon as they secure their spot in the processor space again, they will start to branch out and take on other markets, but if their core space is under assault, they either have to defend or abandon. They have too much to lose to flee the x86 market.
Place something witty here
then will they release the specs, etc, as Open Source/... and let someone else make the things ? After all: they will not lose anything. But: I doubt that that will happen.
This is about the 15th iteration I have witnessed of this.
Step 1: Somebody at Intel gets a Bright Idea to develop some new market. We gots lots o cash so why not lets do it. (i.e. collect underpants)
Step 2: ...
Step 3: Profit.
Step 3.1: Er, no profit. We ended up not owning the market. Pull the plug lets get back to our core competency: i386-architecture processors it is. What's AMD been doing recently?
When they are making bank on their desktop and Server CPUs the way they are, the last thing they need is a bunch of snot-nosed kids.
Instead, they are focusing their resources on staving-off the coming AMD CPU wave...
Yeah, Hillary would totally have bought more Edison boards! 7 dollar AVR? Nah, x86 is worth the extra cost
It's not like Intel's stuff sucked; it just wasn't the right size for most makers' problems.
For most makers' problems, something as weak as an Arduino is fucking perfect. For a few cases, you need a little more and the ARM stuff (e.g. pi) is fine.
If you need more than that, though, why settle for Intel's little stuff? Just have a Xeon box somewhere and your little mobile ARM thing can talk to it over wifi.
What size problems did Edison fit? Nothing that I can think of. Never needed one. Edison was too expensive and overkill for small problems, and too weak for big ones.
Intel's offerings in this market have been weak in terms of price/performance compared to the competition.
When compared to Arduino Uno R3 and other microcontrollers, Intel microcontrollers were too expensive, bulky, and slow compared. No communitiy formed around these microcontrollers because Intel was unresponsive to the community. Sort of like big companies like Oracle who are unresponsive or allergic to community efforts.
Let me see: $25 for an Ardunio UNO with a huge responsive community vs. $90 for a microcontroller from Intel where there is no community. Hmmm...
Intel following in Google's steps. Neither can seem to hang onto their endeavors.
Maybe Intel is facing stronger competition these days. But the real problem in this case probably just is that the "Maker Movement" was nothing more than yet another hipster fad. It's typically not possible to make profit off of hipster fads.
The difference between hipster fads and normal fads is that hipster fads exhibit a social media amplification effect beyond what even most other fads exhibit.
In a typical widespread fad, there is a large amount of demand and a large amount of hype. But the ratio of demand to hype is relatively even, allowing for some profit to be made off of the fad. For every unit of hype that attracts the attention of producers, there's a corresponding unit of demand. The producers can actually sell what they're making, and if they do this well they can make a profit.
A hipster fad is different in that the ratio of demand to hype is very skewed. There is little demand, but a comparatively huge amount of hype. This means that profit cannot be made as easily, if at all. For every unit of hype that attracts the attention of producers, there is only a very small fractional unit of demand. The producers end up producing too much relative to the small demand, which actually has the effect of driving prices down to below profitable levels.
This situation arises because hipsters excel at producing hype, especially on the Internet, yet never manage to back up this hype with ability. This is quite evident within the computer software industry, where a lot of hipsters try to participate. We see huge hype bubbles surrounding technologies like Ruby on Rails and Rust, yet despite all of the hype we see very little of value actually delivered.
It's similar for this low-end computing hardware. A lot of hipster types like to exclaim how they're "makers" because it sounds good in social media discussion, yet they lack the skills, ability, interest and typically the money (they usually spend this on overly expensive products, such as those from Apple) to actually go out and buy any low-end computing hardware. If they do happen to buy it, they end up not doing anything with it, or stop trying after quickly failing to accomplish anything with it.
The real lesson here is that companies in general should smarten up and ignore what hipsters are saying and doing. They're among the worst markets to target, unless you're Apple and you're exploiting the vanity of hipsters. But there's only room enough for one Apple-style company which totally drains the resources of hipsters, leaving very little for the rest of the market to extract. That's why the rest of the market shouldn't even bother.
Out with the "everybody can code" movement, in with the "programmers are hand-models, MAGA bigly!" ... I saw that stinky Obama man encourage people to code!!
Anyone who ever seriously considered Intel's "maker" products for embedded use (as I did) would quickly find that they were power hungry and over-priced. Either one of those problems would be death in this market.
Marketing can cover a lot of sins, but these together are really hard to overcome. "Let's market the shit out of this shit" only really works when aimed at consumers or executives. Makers are engineers. They can smell the bullshit from miles away.
It's a healthier marketplace without such inferior offerings in it.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
I'll give you a maker success where Intel failed. Check out the ESP8266
http://esp8266.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266
Originally sold as a low cost serial-connected wifi solution so manufactures could at "Internet" to products. Espressif also offered the now ubiquitous ESP-01 module that quickly became a very popular and cheap way to add wifi to existing arduino projects.
Then someone started poking around at the chip itself and found it was many times more powerful than the micros that it was being connected to. (About 80 times faster than the atmega that powers the Uno) Also has a LOT more memory and flash.
They asked Espressif for and SDK.. And they gave it to them. Fast forward, we've got an opensource tool chain and a number powerful frameworks including native arduino support.
And arduino-like boards with gpio and power regulators and all that fun stuff so you can run sketches directly. Like the Wemos D1.. Which is about 4 bucks on ali express. (Yeah. 4 bucks for a really fast arduino WITH wifi and more memory and more storage)
The ESP8266 was designed as a wifi-add on so it lacks a lot of features and gpio that the usual general micros have. Fortunatly the thing is fast clever programming and bit-banging can get around a lot of that. Still, there is a lack of physical pins.. And you have to be careful not to stall the or tie up the CPU with your code or wifi will drop. .. So enter the ESP32. Espressif hired the guys who wrote the tool chains above and put out a new product. Wifi, bluetooth, More memory and flash. Two cpu cores so services can run on one and your code won't break them. Lots of GPIO pins with native hardware support for a lot of peripherals and communication protocols.
https://espressif.com/en/products/hardware/esp32/overview
Open SDK and toolchain. Arduino support is still a work in progress and other frameworks are coming right a long.
all hands on desk to beat AMD they don't have time for this as they may need to make a big move to save there ass / free up room for big price cuts.
This reminds me of the book Makers. In that book, near the beginning, Polaroid tries to reinvent itself through the "maker movement" and completely self-destructs. The "maker" thing is really the same thing as "open source" which is people sharing ideas with each other. As soon as you try to apply business philosophy to that, it's like trying to apply a business philosophy to the Apollo program. When you don't know what's out there, you just need exploration, not exploitation. Companies can't handle the risk involved - it's all too uncertain for a 4 year payback.
People in their own workshops and homes are doing some amazing stuff. Companies see this and think they need to get in on it, but the hobbyists aren't doing it to make money, and most of them don't have much money, so there isn't much money to be made.
When I was younger I made less money and didn't have a family so I had a lot more time to put into hobbies and stuff. I scrounged through spare parts bins and re-used whatever I could. I could spend hours price-comparing and trying to find components that were $2 instead of $3 to save a buck. But back then I was a real "maker". Now I have more money and a lot less time. I take on much simpler projects and I'm willing to spend money to get it done faster. I don't buy the $2 or the $3 component - I buy the $20 pre-assembled solution and plug it in. So I don't want to buy Intel's fancy Arduino because it doesn't really save me any time, and my old self wouldn't either because it's too expensive for what it does.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
If Intel had wanted to OWN this market, they already did, back in the 90s through mid '00s. 8051, the non-milspec i960 models, strongarm, you name it, they probably had a product line to cover it.
They were once one of the largest embedded device and memory manufacturers in the world, but divested themselves of it because it was high volume and low profit, unlike x86, which they chose to focus on at the expense of almost all else (there are some obvious examples to the contrary, notably their ethernet controllers, which are used in all sorts of places, including AMD hardware, much like you could find AMD parallel flash on Intel branded motherboards some years ago.
But he thought it was the Baker Movement and he showed up with a bib and two big forks at the meeting!
The "maker mouvement" isn't fueled by high-priced gadgets. In fact it's the opposite, it's people building things for themselves because either what they want doesn't exists or because what already exists costs too much.
Arduino became successful because it was powerful enough and cheap enough for thousands of projects. Then it became extremely successful when China started selling clones at about 25% or less than the original. If you have space on your PCB design, it costs less to add an Arduino Pro mini at around $2 than adding a bare ATmega328P + crystal + caps.
Intel's game is to make extreme profits just like Apple. If AMD entered the "maker mouvement" they would probably have a chance because they'd design for a fixed cost, not a high-end features list.
#DeleteFacebook
Actually, Why not? She totally rolled her own email server.
Check it: Intel Edison w/ Mini Breakout board at https://www.adafruit.com/produ...: $75!
Sure, it's got a dual-core, dual-threaded Atom, a gig of RAM, Wifi, and Bluetooth, but it's too expensive to just say "Sure, I'll grab one and play around with weekend."
You can grab the Starter Pack at https://www.adafruit.com/produ... for only $65, and look at all the components you get! And a ton of components, including LEDs, power supply, etc.
Technically, it competes with the Raspberry Pi, not the Arduino, but it's got a weird Linux distro (to which the forums are hard to find and use the terrible mailman interface) and a hell of a lot less example projects and much higher power consumption.
I don't understand the difference between the Galileo, Edison, and Joule (and you can't get the Joule on adafruit anyway), which speaks toward poor technical documentation.
In short, too expensive and not enough examples for hobbyists, and professionals are going for lower-power consumption, better software, and something cheaper.
Ah, you got me there :-)