Points all taken. I just think that the industry moves in some very consistent directions
- Make platforms easy to develop for.
- Memory is getting cheaper - expect more and more of it.
- Stuff is getting smaller - expect smaller and smaller packages.
- The SOC paradigm is a powerful one - expect more of it as well.
- With the containers paradigm there is also the trend towards same platform/environment everywhere which feeds back to #1 above.
Put all these together and this seems quite believable to me. It’s not the past but it could well be the future.
Rpi and beaglebone are nice examples of cheap SoC compact computers. They’re prime examples of cheap and powerful single board computers. What I was pointing out with the microcontrollers though is cheap and efficient processing power for embedded comsumer product applications. Those types of applications don’t require an OS to function, a compiled program in native code to the processor is plenty enough.