The issue is that their corporate culture does not support it. Arduino will be too small to matter. This is the same issue as with Coral, the Google TPU. They are not refreshed as they are too small. They are too small cause they are not updated or supported widely.

People need mainline kernel support and regular refreshes to reliably build projects based on it. This will require some level of building their BSPs in open and providing APIs for people to take advantage of the QCOM specific features. A QCOM that won't talk to anyone without an NDA cannot adapt to this.

> This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping. Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers

For this, Qualcomm does not have to buy Arduino for a big amount of money: Qualcomm could simply offer this option on their own and save the acquisition cost.

Addendum: For the acquisition cost, Qualcomm could do a lot of marketing of their offering towards makers.

The problem is that massive semiconductor companies like Qualcomm rarely follow through. They want their lottery ticket to be included in the next smartphone revolution but won't care about random under 5k unit Kickstarter. Everyone knows that those are two sides of the same coin, but they always choose to wait for the bankruptcy trustees to show up.

Seems like a similar play to what Broadcom did with Raspberry Pi— create a new entity/brand that could resell their chips on hobby boards and be stewards of a "community" support framework but largely without distracting the company from its enterprise customers or risk cannibalizing those relationships.

That said, interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new in the space.

As other have pointed out, that doesn't make any sense. Qualcomm doesn't want anyone buying their products at 1k quantities for prototyping. They want huge customers that place huge orders consistently. The return for supporting those small orders is miserable and doesn't align with their business objectives

Qualcomm has bought plenty of companies that serviced small customers, and what happed is exactly what the person you’re replying to described. You can’t even get a quote many times.

What I expect short term is what happened to Eagle in the PCB space when Autodesk bought it (best thing that happened to kicad).

Longterm Arduino goes into the periphery of the maker market, similarly to beaglebone.

Qualcomm did not need to buy Arduino in order to do that.

It's cheaper and easier to just spin your own boards at that point. Arduinos are not complex or special in any way. Even if you did need a ton of off the shelf boards, there are countless clones that will sell you as many as you want for next to nothing.

Plus the market you're implying exists is so small as to be utterly worthless to Qualcomm. They are in no way interested in individuals or small businesses

> Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers

I'll believe it when I see it