The "problem" with software is that the margins are "too high", so companies _usually_ don't care. The general attitude I've encountered is that the engineering salary dominates the cost, so it's usually not worth spending time optimizing runtime costs.
This is eventually taken to the extreme and you occasionally see posts here titled something like "how we saved millions by doing X", where the thing they were originally doing was extremely wasteful.
For the last decade, we've also been in a "free money" mode. Where companies were happy to spend money as long as it led to growth. Optimizing for cost wasn't a priority.
That has leaked into electrical engineering as well. There were a few products that shipped full Raspberry pis in an enclosure in the name of velocity. The savings possible there were probably in the dollars, not cents, not to mention the supply chain issues. And yet companies did it in the name of velocity.
>There were a few products that shipped full Raspberry pis in an enclosure in the name of velocity. The savings possible there were probably in the dollars, not cents, not to mention the supply chain issues. And yet companies did it in the name of velocity.
Sometimes it's better to have a product that you can sell, than waiting to perfect the product to sell.
Let's leave aside the RPi availability issues, you could do this with any other discovery board.
Say you want to sell your first 1000 of products x, y, and z to see how the product market fit is. You might find that x and y don't sell at all, but z was sold out in the blink of an eye.
Now you can design a custom PCB for z, knowing that it will probably sell well. And until that is finished you continue selling the off the shelf version. Some profit is better than no profit, and consistency is good for your brand.
This is eventually taken to the extreme and you occasionally see posts here titled something like "how we saved millions by doing X", where the thing they were originally doing was extremely wasteful.
For the last decade, we've also been in a "free money" mode. Where companies were happy to spend money as long as it led to growth. Optimizing for cost wasn't a priority.
That has leaked into electrical engineering as well. There were a few products that shipped full Raspberry pis in an enclosure in the name of velocity. The savings possible there were probably in the dollars, not cents, not to mention the supply chain issues. And yet companies did it in the name of velocity.