When their focus changed to more corporate aligned interests they became less cool. Victims of their own success I’d guess.

But this a politician’s answer. They just didn’t answer the question at all but implied that if we check back in 15 years we’d see that they had “our” best interests at heart.

Um no company has your back. They are all in it to make as much money as possible. I mean I don’t blame them but I don’t trust the em either.

Lol, right?

The sheer ego to tell your customers to reserve judgement on a massive, company changing event for over a fucking decade! Delusional.

Especially when they've been completely beat out in their market niche for ages and are now only holding on due to brand recognition. It's easy to have grass roots community support when you were the only product in your niche, but they've been coasting on that for ages with no real work to truly stay relevant.

This is the same answer always given by every sell-out right before they sell out their users/customers, and it always collapses into a silent capitulation to enshittification not long thereafter.

To customers/users of a product or service, IPO should mean only one thing: Last call; FLEE NOW!

"...watch us [do exactly that]. Keep watching [as we do exactly that and worse]. Let's look at it in 15, 20 years' time [long after I've cut and run with my golden parachute and left the rotting corpse of this company get picked apart by vulture investors and am long past caring]"

They were definitely a pioneer in the SBC market. But there are tons of alternatives out there nowadays. And if you are amenable to upcycling, you can get old 1L-class x86 machines from enterprise companies doing dump/replace cycles for dirt cheap on eBay or Craigslist or FB marketplace.

TL;DR: yes it’s frustrating to see. But as consumers, we have tons of options these days, so it’s not really a catastrophic loss even if Rpi goes down the enshittification path.