C.H.I.P. – Raspberry Pi competitor

Yes, but needs to be managed well.

[unnamed company] has had such a focus almost from the beginning. A very nice and friendly plastic case, vastly superior to the ones from all their competitors, plus a switching power supply (vs. heavy and $$$ transformer) were the major initial differentiaters of their 2nd product, their 3rd major product critically failed in part because its developed early in the process case ended up being too small (although cheap sockets were the most critical failure), and when they bought a Cray, back when those were ultra cool, they justified it by saying how it would be used it to simulate injection molding and save on tooling costs.

Getting back to the point of this subthread, I had contact with TI people (cloning the Lisp Machine with gate arrays, and otherwise saving LMI for a while) when they were using make it up with accessories strategy with their home PC. "We're shipping a $20 bill with every unit" one said, that would be $48 in 2015 dollars, and in the end they didn't make up the difference. Probably because the subsidized base unit you bought was "meh" in most every way, I can see a lot of people not being enthused enough by it and its software ecosystem to want to buy a lot more stuff, especially with more developed ecosystems by [unnamed company], Commodore, IBM, Tandy/Radio Shack, and the CP/M crowd.