What infuriates me is Ebon selling himself as some sort of hero, claiming that they're prioritizing things so that "people don't lose their jobs." How brave and noble of him, right?
If he stopped supplying OEMs, nobody would lose their jobs. The opposite, in fact. More engineering staff and contractors and consultants would get work because these companies would have to re-develop their products to use an in-house SBC or any of the hundreds of industrial SBCs out there.
Everyone else can't do that. Your average hobbyist can't just call up an industrial SBC company and buy. That was the whole point behind the Pi (well, the whole point was using up shitty SoCs that Broadcom hadn't been able to sell, but that's beside the point.)
What's really going on is that Ebon is prioritizing large OEMs who use Pis because they don't want to be bothered spending R&D to develop their own embedded system.
Meanwhile he's fucking over every small guy. All the retailers who have lost all that revenue and associated accessory sales? Fucked. What about their livelihoods? What about the logistics people they employed? They apparently can all get fucked.
All the non-profits (like libraries, hackerspaces, schools, etc) who may have secured budget and grant money for Pi-based programs that now cannot be spent? Fucked. rarely can money secured for purpose A be diverted to purpose B, and more often than not, you simply lose the funding entirely and you lose that amount of money from next year's budget, too.
How about the thousands of cottage industry small entrepreneurs making a living off Pi-based products they've developed? Fucked.
How about all the researchers, using Pis for data collection and controlling experiments? Fucked.
How about all the people who had home or business automation who need to replace a damaged or fried Pi? Fucked.
But thank god we're saving jobs at those large corporations who went with Pis because it was a cost-saving measure.
The Pi Foundation isn't even particularly competent. Every single Pi model has had problems, and the Pi 4 had basic, obvious-within-minutes-to-anyone-who-tried-to-use-it problems with power because the Pi foundation fucked up their USB-PD implementation.
Ebon says they're making 6M Pi's a year but it's months between any US supplier getting Pis, which means he's doing way more than "prioritizing OEMs."