Well, they sure as fuck didn't go to the hobbyist market, we've been getting fucked by the rPi foundation for 3 years now.

I'm not intimately familiar with the BCM2711 but I believe it's a reasonable, albeit somewhat overpowered, processor for the application. It can be put into a variety of low power states and probably pulled out of sleep by various events like the GSM chip sending packets or accelerometer motion (frequently the peripheral chips have dedicated "wakeup" pins that you can wire to interrupts). It's not the most cost effective option by far, there are sub $5 microcontrollers with multiple cores for handling communications and real time motor control concurrently but you'd need to hire someone like me for a few months @$200/hr to write the low level drivers and design the boards. The rpi lets random web-only devs fumble their way through hardware development using whatever GitHub Python libraries they can find. If you only need a hundred scooters it makes more sense to just yolo it and buy up the remaining supply of rpis to start your grift.

putting prototypes straight into production is the "tech startup" way!

Surely the drive motors use far more energy than the computer, and the computer doesn't need to be fully powered on all the time.

It's a lot cheaper than getting an EE to design you a more efficient bespoke solution.

Pis are pretty commonly used in industrial automation use cases (production lines, robot arms, etc) too. They're not the best thing for those use cases, but they're far cheaper than anything else, and anyone with basic programming knowledge can get something running on them, rather than having to find someone experienced with embedded systems (usually in C or C++).

When there were major supply chain issues, a lot of the limited supply was going towards those use cases, as the companies using them had already placed large orders very far in advance.

Privatized profits, socialized loses.

Companies can just dump shit wherever when they're done with it and have no responsibility to clean it up?

🌎👨‍🚀🔫👩‍🚀

I’d be willing to risk it all for the pi.

When the fine for littering and the cost of repair or recycling is higher than what you can recoup from this sort of lost property, it's a win win for the police.

My city still has them. They get picked up every night and put at whatever corners or lots they gather them to.

Honestly in my experience anyone that's complained about them has no idea at all what they do or how they work, so anyone "fed up finding them everywhere" is simply ignorant 99% of the time. They're supposed to be everywhere lol that's the entire point.

In my European city they're still popular but imho it's a grift to get money from investors with large pockets. I see brands popping out and go out of the market in 6 months. They just need to lose just the right amount of money in order to have the longest list of supported cities at the moment of raising capital. It's an application that's too expensive for every day use (1 euro unlock fee + 20 cents a minute in a city with a subway and extensive bus network???) but at the same time that ridiculous amount of money is clearly not enough to be sustainable. And they all use dark patterns. App forces you to register with email and sms verification just to see prices and you need to recharge credit that you might be never be able to use. Most they auto charge the credit card for 10 euro as soon as the credit goes under 5 euro.

Maybe the real money making activity is unusable credit in user accounts?

Denver still has a ton of them. They’re still a huge logistics problem, but the city seems to be putting “protected” lanes in to help with scooters and bikes. Time will tell.

I can't say anything about US cities, but they are all over the place in Canadian cities(or at least they are where I live)

Remember the Cant!

Probably, who is gonna come after you? The company has decided it is too expensive to repossess them.