[DenseComet]

The Arduino strategy seems to be similar to the Raspberry one - as people who grew up tinkering with Arduinos go into industry and are placed in charge of decisions, an upmarket edition of Arduino is a natural pick.

[rootbeerdan]

Also see: espressif and the esp-32, it's like a sick joke dealing with TI and NXP afterwards

[bongodongobob]

Nah. You just use the Atmel chip and get rid of Arduino completely.

[londons_explore]

The benefit of Arduino is that your boss can say "we just need something that switches this water pump on whenever it's above 20C but not if the battery is low or for more than an hour per day", and you can have the whole project coded, soldered and working in an hour.

The advantage of the platform is speed of development, not engineering good practice or mass manufacturing.