> There is always a way to obtain engineering samples/devkits. That's how the products in these 100,000 runs get to be.
Of course there is. But what's the point for me to produce a prototype if I'll have to produce hundreds of thousands of units in production with no way to sell that much?
> You don't buy from SoC vendors directly unless you're an enormous operation. Farnell, Mouser, DigiKey, Elfa.
There are certainly parts that are unobtainium, that's why you need to have a good relationship with someone who has good relationships with parts distributors. A very important part of component selection is to make sure that you can obtain the parts in the quantity necessary. My general rule, is if I can't source it from digikey, I probably can't make the product, but I tend to design products that do runs in the hundreds, maybe thousands of units, so I don't have the same access to components as someone who's doing 10s of thousands of production runs. That said, you may be surprised what your factory can get it's hands on. And if you don't have a factory, then that might be an important step earlier than you might think. Sadly, I have no experience on how to build a factory relationship, and I'd imagine it's especially hard to find a factory with low expected volume. Yet another thing that makes hardware more expensive than you might think...
There is always a way to obtain engineering samples/devkits. That's how the products in these 100,000 runs get to be.
> That's what I thought before contacting SoC vendors.
You don't buy from SoC vendors directly unless you're an enormous operation. Farnell, Mouser, DigiKey, Elfa.