The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market

I work on IoT projects professionally, and we see a large gap between makers-grade hardware and production-quality systems. Every week we talk with startups and enterprise customers who start off on something like an Arduino, only to hit a wall because there is no good way to take it to production.<p>IMHO, the market is ripe for a hardware&#x2F;software platform that bridges the ease of Arduino with a path to production. A bunch of the silicon vendors are in this space, but they offer weak solutions, and things like AWS IoT are really bad on the hardware side.

As someone who spent a bit of time trying to start a project based on the Edison, the most frustrating thing was the amount of bugs and the lack of documentation to be able to do anything about it myself, leaving me hopelessly waiting for them to release fixes.<p>For example, after several months of terribly slow and buggy SPI and no fix over multiple releases, I finally switched to ARM and am very glad I did. Intel did finally fix the SPI issue about 9 months after it was first reported.<p>With ARM, I had plenty of issues and challenges, but had the documentation and resources I needed to be able to fix things, as well as a better support community.<p>One of the key issues in the Intel support communities was a growing lack of trust, now confirmed by Intel dropping out. It takes a big commitment to really understand a system, and the nice thing about ARM is that the community goes beyond a single company, so a company dropping out is not as significant as in this case with Intel.

Was Intel ever seriously in the maker market? As a maker, I feel that it was kind of an afterthought for them. The Edison looked great on paper, but the price was wrong, the tooling was inadequate, and the whole attempt felt like an enterprise was just trying to cargo-cult its way into some marketshare.

Because no one looks at an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi and says, &quot;I would pay top dollar for a version of this thing that has x86 instructions.&quot;

Intels addiction to high margin products might prove to be their undoing as they get disrupted from below.

Everything you need to know about joke of an Intel IoT&#x2F;maker offering is right there in hackaday comments:<p>&quot;Chinese companies, even with a language barrier, are <i></i>BETTER THAN INTEL<i></i> at documentation&quot;

I&#x27;m not very surprised with this. Quite a long time ago I came across their Galileo boards but for the price point it just did not seem worth it - 2 - 4 times the price of a RasperryPi or Uno.<p>The appeal&#x2F;benefit of having x86 was just never there for me or the agency I was at. I could see how it might be useful if you are writing a lot of assembly and low level at that but this seemed too much of a niche with the way they were marketed. If it had networking and I could use it with Python I was happy.

Intel really seems to be stuck in their commodity PC &#x2F; Server mentality. The number of customizations that are done these days in mobile and I suspect as things become cheaper IoT is pretty impressive. Intel hates customization since that means other people make money (see the whole NVidia Ion chipset saga). I just cannot see them making any headway with their current &quot;must be high volume commodity product&quot; attitude.

I think Intel realized that the &#x27;maker market&#x27; is the craft&#x2F;toy&#x2F;hobby market not the embedded systems market. Intel is also dealing with threats to its core businesses so better to pull back from a marginal market that can&#x27;t even support what were the two leading chip companies in the space (Atmel &amp; Microchip) and focus on not losing market share to ARM in other areas.

Intel attempting to make a play in the maker market with their x86 cores seem attractive to many software developers. Partnering with arduino was a good move for usability but the boards that they were competing with were players like Beagle board and Raspberry Pi. Realistically they could try to be in third place but to unseat ARM boards proved to be too difficult.

It&#x27;s quite unfortunate as they were a convenient middle ground between amateur and &quot;we&#x27;ll sell to you only if you order 500+ units&quot; boards, and the brand was famous enough in less technical circles to help prototypes being taken seriously (given the technical side is rarely what kills off a project).

Not the first time. Intel got into mobile devices circa 2000-2001 or so. Then suddenly they abandoned this area.<p>I worked on a secure (authenticated, encrypted) port forwarding proxy for mobile devices at that time. Our company partnered with Intel to bring the software to their new mobile devices. We were quite far along, with working demos and all. Then one fine day, word came down from the higher levels in Intel that they are pulling out of that.<p>The Intel team we collaborated with were split up and sent in different ways within Intel and that was that.<p>It was bad for us because we put resources into it and were counting on some cash which never materialized, plus the dot com bust was in full downward swing.

I saw it coming when they discontinued Joule and Galileo.<p>I actually liked the Curie chip, plenty of goodies in one die. From bluetooth LE to battery charger to accelerometer and gyro plus hardware acceleration for k nearest neighbor (cool for gesture recognition). All that on small form factor low energy die.<p>Plus, I _feel_ safer using a curie for IoT than just using a raspberry pi and never updating a linux distro.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;19&#x2F;intel-discontinues-joule-galileo-and-edison-product-lines&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;19&#x2F;intel-discontinues-joule-gal...</a>

I wonder if all those declarations by Intel are just a game: Declare something big&#x2F;interesting with tons of media etc - stock picks up by x%, than a few years afterwards, cancel it without a fanfare, stock goes down by much less than x%. Intel wins. For those knowledgeable about the stock market, could it be the case ?<p>Because that would be a good explain why did Intel enter this field, which is is a very poor fit for it - unless they come with some breakthrough.

Reminds me of a saying that one of my startup mentors has said many times. &quot;A great way to make a small fortune in home automation is to start with a large fortune.&quot; Seems that Intel is taking their step back rather than doubling down on the long game.

Intel could make tons of money by licensing their IP so 5-10 USD SoC could flood the IoT market.

I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to get hold of an intel gallileo at launch as a gift from intel.<p>Unfortuantely the experience of using it was mediocre and am not the least bit surprised about this news.

Sounds like to me this is because the market for developing novel IOT devices is not as disruptive as previously thought.

Wow, that was fast.

Good riddance!

One could argue the never actually entered the maker market. I can&#x27;t name one prominent project that used any Intel maker oriented device. That&#x27;s a monumental marketing&#x2F;product development failure: offer overpriced products that don&#x27;t really do much (if anything) new, then completely fail to get people interested in them. No one cares about your instruction set here, so you can&#x27;t ride on that alone.

Well, that took a surprisingly long time to happen.<p>The maker community represents a trivial (at best) contribution to Intel&#x27;s bottom line. Intel&#x27;s bread has always been buttered by delivering high-performance, server-grade chips to the people willing to pay for the cutting edge of performance. And every year, at that! That&#x27;s pretty much the opposite of the maker market - people who are building electronics for fun, and not exactly flush with cash to spend on it. I&#x27;d wager that the net profit of any one of Intel&#x27;s enterprise customers vastly outstrips the entirety of what they made on their <i>entire</i> maker line of chips and boards.<p>Why would they bother diluting their production focus and stretching their support engineers thin, to help court and address the concerns of a bunch of spendthrift HW hackers and garage IoT operations?