Yeah, you are right. But just as a reality check here, and please take my question not as offensive and with a grain of salt:
What product you got from China in the last years did not undercut the marketing language at at least 50%?
In my case it is a lot. LED’s(bogo chip copies)? Rechargeable batteries (power cells)? Power or measuring circuits or tools/boards? PSU’s? Audio equipment like DAC’s and AMP’s (SNR, output power, conformity)? opto-electronic isolators? Electric tools? Circuit cooling equipment? Cables (ratings/conformity/quality/material)? Antenna’s (SNR, gain, frequencies)?, heating/cooling stuff like grease, putty’s, pads?, electrical mobility like e-bikes, e-scooters, e-motorcycles (power/quality/longlivety/serviceability)?..
Got “cried a wolf” a lot, and still got this board. Like most of you too.
And the market is fine with that? Yeah! Of course. Consumers buy because of the lower prices, and the market exports 90% because the labor/R&D/production/shipping costs vs the gains are very good. And nothing really is worthy of regress because every consumer knows until now, if they don’t want to help you they just don’t and you can do nothing about it. And consumers buy, because being lucky means they save at least 50% of the prices compared to a buy in their own country (where a China product gets sold from a regional company for double the price).
The last chip I have seen so many hypes about, so many hopes of open source was the RK3588. Some people really invested a lot of their life-time into getting stuff done to open source it. 3 years later 20% are still not really functional without blobs, and progress died because it was used in drones in a war due to the obvious advantages and small form factor, power usage of that chip. But we all had high hopes and RK sold millions of that chip.
Humans have to rely on hope. On descent people trying to do the descent thing. On those people not getting pushed by one marketing decision they can do nothing about.
The demand on this new open source promise is so high, that my earliest January order got pushed 3 weeks due to unexpected high demand. That can tell us how much hope we all have.
Everyone who can read (on this forum here e.g.) knows the risk of this promise, the hope. In the end we still have to remind of that promise and have luck.
And sure, the marketing was lackluster, to say the least. This is not mainstream. Alder Lake N is. Or 1200-2000 bucks ARM on Windows machines are. Apple’s M. But not for a) Linux and b) for this price. Hope is, that this time it is different, better circumstances etc. Whoever really believes the marketing of a “from the start open source, ready for everything” rides his unicorn to Mars on Wednesdays.
It is still a promise and a lie. Like on 50% of every AAA game on release day. But it is a start. Also for more trust. Trust leads to sales. And the “westerners” respecting nod towards a CN product fulfilling to a marketing lie, maybe half a year or a year after release would lead to more sales. It’s as simple as that - so to say a “reverse wolf cry”. Lets hope for that.