Raspberry Pi Announces RP2040 Chips For $1

[L_A_G]

$1 is already really cheap, but if they're cheaper than that once they hit "reel-scale", they better make sure they can scale their manufacturing because these things will have trouble staying on the shelf.

I wouldn't be too sure about that when companies who make embedded systems that use chips like this tend to insist on at least a decade of availability. In the embedded product world you just don't have the yearly new product cycle that you see in consumer products and instead it's not uncommon for the exact same products to be manufactured with very minimal changes for well over a decade. This is after all going to be replacing solutions based on parts with Zilog Z80, MOS 6502 and Motorola 68k-cores and there's solutions using those cores that have been in production for well over a decade.