The U.S. Government Just Followed Through on Its Ban of DJI Drones

They exist, they just don't ship to individual nobodies without NDAs and months of talks and supply commitments, therefore we might as well consider them nonexistent. And that's sinking the whole world into oblivion, and no one(sane) is doing anything about it.

Chinese equivalents of Western products ship same day to mail drops at two digits below USD denominated global market manufacturing costs. That's their secret sauce. Or tried and true East Asian miracles strategy, of exploiting material independence to vacuum in foreign currency that are short of cost but are just trustless bundles of paper anyway. Economic competition is not possible when that's possible for them and nobody else - NOBODY else, not like "only for Asian backwater whatever failed state", but China, for now, specifically.

I'm actually from Japan and, with goggles of a maker on, DJI behavior feels reminiscent of Sony until it sank. The tech is top notch, and prices make progressively less sense towards higher ends. That kills competitions by denying sales of high end products(IMO. I'm not a sane person).

It helps to separate hobbyist use from professional product development.

The hobby market is driven by quick, cheap, and easy: low up-front cost, abundant tutorials, and inexpensive dev boards. In that context, ESP32 shines, and expensive dev kits can be a real psychological barrier.

For commercial, industrial, or professional products, however, small-quantity pricing is often irrelevant. Sample or single-unit prices rarely reflect real production costs. Without getting into specifics, it’s common for the ratio between sample pricing and volume pricing to be 10× or more.

A part that costs $20 in onesies can easily be a $2 part at scale. This doesn’t apply universally, but it does mean that judging a device’s suitability for mass production based on Digi-Key single-unit pricing is usually a mistake.

There are also system-level considerations beyond the MCU’s line item price. For example, the RP2040 could be very inexpensive (around $0.50 in modest volumes when we used it), but that ignores the required external flash, which adds cost, board space, and supply-chain complexity. More importantly for many products, it offers no meaningful code security (the external flash can simply be read out—which can be a non-starter in commercial designs).

Guaranteed long-term availability can be crucially important as well; with design support requirements in commercial/industrial settings often extending past ten year timelines.

Tooling and ecosystem maturity also matter. At the time, the RP2040 toolchain was notably hostile to Windows, and Raspberry Pi support reflected that attitude. In reality, most product development (EE, MCAD, manufacturing, test, PLM/ERP) is Windows-centric. Asking an organization to bolt a Linux-only toolchain onto an otherwise Windows-based workflow just to save a dollar on an MCU is rarely a winning argument.

So while cost absolutely matters, it’s often not the dominant factor in professional design. Security, tooling, vendor support, long-term availability, and integration into existing workflows frequently outweigh a few dollars of MCU price, particularly once production pricing enters the picture.

Who's sneering?

Complexity is a relative assessment. Bringing up 8, 16 and 32 bit MCUs/SoC's has never in history been easier. Decades ago we used to have to bring up our boards from nothing, sometimes even having to write our own RTOS, boot code, firmware update code, etc. Today? A high school kid could do it with most chips. Go check out the STM32 Cube ecosystem for a glimpse.

I do understand that this is still likely daunting for hobbyists. I am not talking about arduino-level hobby users. That is not my world at all. However, understand that the commercial/industrial market is orders of magnitude larger than the hobby markets, and the rules and requirements are different.

> It is failing to understand this that opens the door to DJI and Bambu, who unsurprisingly prioritize user experience and predictability, which is a major factor in why in open competition they keep wiping the floor with everyone.

Are you responding to someone else's comment? This has nothing to do with what I was addressing. I am talking about chips, and, in particular, SoC (System on Chip) solutions for WiFi applications. These are components used by engineers to design products. You are talking about finished products. You might as well add blender and microwave oven manufacturers to that list.

I didn’t directly answer that question before.

Strictly speaking, nothing essential is missing from many of these other parts. In fact, in professional contexts they often have better documentation, support, longevity guarantees, or security features than ESP32.

One of the biggest differentiators is simply pricing strategy. Espressif has used aggressively low pricing (what many would reasonably call predatory pricing) to capture mindshare and market share. That playbook is hardly new; it’s been used successfully across industries for decades. Ultra-cheap silicon, combined with inexpensive dev boards, dramatically lowers the barrier to entry and makes ESP32 the default choice, especially for hobbyists and startups.

Price pressure also creates a feedback loop: more users means more tutorials, libraries, examples, and community support, which in turn makes the platform feel easier and safer to choose, even when alternatives might be technically superior.

For teams operating in cost-driven markets, this can become unavoidable. If your product lives or dies on BOM cost, reaching for the cheapest viable part may not be optional. I spent several years in that environment myself, and while it’s a valid constraint, it tends to push decisions toward short-term cost optimization rather than long-term engineering value.

So the answer isn’t that these parts lack features, it’s that ESP32 combines good-enough capabilities with exceptionally aggressive pricing and a massive ecosystem, which together make it the default choice in many contexts.