Are these used in actual mass manufactured products? I haven't run into one on anything i've opened up. I've run into a couple of pics (these seems to make a friend of mine believe that pic is a better choice for products!) can someone throw light on this based on personal experience?
I would suspect that Microchip, TI and Freescale compete better in the mass markets.
The major advantage to these Atmel devices (168/328) is the user support with
the tools. Without that support it would be a lot more difficult to build a large
community like the Arduino has.
(* jcl *)
these seems to make a friend of mine believe that pic is a better choice for products!
What makes a better choice for a product is price / availability and fit to the solution. PICs followed a route many years ago of selling their development systems very cheaply and thus generating a generation of young engineers who were conformable using it. In my opinion the architecture of the main PIC processors is long past it's sell by date. And a lot of PIC development was in assembler only as a C compiler was expensive.
This same route is being trod by the ATMEGA, it has the advantage of a a free compiler. However at the end of the day it is only an 8 bit processor so there are many tasks it is not suited for.
It actually makes little difference what processor you use if it is suited to the task. I understand what you are trying to do but there is no point in doing this as in the end professionally you will use what is in the interest of the business.
Are these used in actual mass manufactured products?
A customer of mine uses AVRs and PICs just about equally. They use whichever processor is best suited to the task.