This is the first time I'm hearing of the Pico. Is there any reason to use it, instead of the ESP32 or ESP8266 boards, or one of the many Arduino compatible uC's?
The competitors seem to be much more common than the Raspberry Pico (i.e. it is much easier to find expansion boards, examples etc. for them). They seem to cost roughly the same too, and the ESPs even include WiFi and in the case of the ESP32 even Bluetooth, which makes interfacing with them so much easier.
I'm kinda surprised they released that. The RPi was awesome because it was the first mass-produced SBC (making it both affordable and well documented/supported). There are many competitors, but none so universal and common. With microcontrollers, I don't see any unique selling point, nothing that could get them to that position.
I don't see any real killer (technical) feature. But I think that's always been the case for the Raspberry products: you could always get the same (and often better) features in other boards (though this may be less true as of the Pi4 which actually was and still is very competitive in the SBC market).
The Raspberry Pi was developed for teaching, as a low cost board that's easy to work with and that has good community support. It wasn't intended to be the most advanced board for your projects, and you could always find something cheaper if you really wanted and didn't mind the hassle..
The Pico is very similar. You get it for less than 5 eur from official distributors in Europe, you plug it in and it shows up as a USB mass storage device onto which you drop your program and off you go. I can see it being a very popular way to get started with microcontrollers, and just like Arduino, that popularity is not a function of features.
I'm curious to see where they take it though. It's their first in-house chip afaik, and the board is rather bare. I wouldn't be surprised if they release variants with more features.
The competitors seem to be much more common than the Raspberry Pico (i.e. it is much easier to find expansion boards, examples etc. for them). They seem to cost roughly the same too, and the ESPs even include WiFi and in the case of the ESP32 even Bluetooth, which makes interfacing with them so much easier.
I'm kinda surprised they released that. The RPi was awesome because it was the first mass-produced SBC (making it both affordable and well documented/supported). There are many competitors, but none so universal and common. With microcontrollers, I don't see any unique selling point, nothing that could get them to that position.