Would I be correct is saying that the only Arduino boards with an ESP32 are using it as a co-processor to provide wireless functionality to chips that have way less memory and peripherals.
Sparkfun and Adafruit both have their own versions of the ESP32.
I think this is a correct statement
Yes but there are alternatives such as the Arduino Nano RP2040 with dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ running at 133MHz. It has 264KB of SRAM, and 16MB of flash memory (off-chip).
Also you need to think in terms of what you do with the flash memory and how it's addressed.
...but you can skip the Arduino board and program the ESP32 directly with the Arduino IDE.
The Nano RP2040 is more expensive than the Sparkfun and Adafruit ESP32 boards and all are 4 times more expensive than an ESP32 dev board from Aliexpress.
Is the Arduino company going to stay relevant or is it going to have the rug pulled from under its feet? Perhaps they are just happy making money selling the Uno to schools for eternity?
There is a very wide choice of ESP32 boards available and at very low cost.
Maybe Arduino have decided its too competative a market for them to make a profit in.
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I have some speculation about the reasons for this:
- The Arduino project prides itself on being open-source. The ESP32's assembler is under an NDA, which clashes with this paradigm.
- For users who need something more powerful than the AVR, there already exist multiple ARM / STM32-based boards, e. g. the Duo, Zero, and MKR Zero (who comes up with those names???). My impression is that these boards are fairly niche, with most users sticking to the AVR-based classics, mostly the Uno and Nano families. Fragmenting this niche even more by bringing a third microcontroller family into the Arduino product range may not be a wise business decision.
- The Arduino product landscape is already a huge mess full of niche products with extremely limited support, which is difficult to navigate, especially for a new customer.
- Within the ESP32 ecosystem, the Arduino IDE/toolchain has competition in the form of NodeMCU, MicroPython and Espressif's ESP-SDK.
- An Arduino-branded ESP32 might have a hard time competing with the existing options for ESP32 dev boards, and may even come off as a rip-off.
And, as srnet has stated, there is already a wide variety of ESP32 boards on the market, many of them cheaper than even an official Arduino Uno.
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I've another one : Arduino announces Arm partnership | Arduino Blog
Interesting statement; is Arduino a hardware company or an Open Source IDE company. As many people utilize an alternative IDE for Arduino development, one surmises the Open Source IDE is not the defining component of Arduino. But, 3rd party boards and core are used, so it must not be the hardware either. If not the IDE and not the hardware, then what is Arduino?
I suggest "Arduino" is a paradigm, a method of programming a microcontroller using an API abstraction layer called "the core" to separate the hardware microcontroller from the C++ user-code. Somewhat like BASIC, the API is enriched with an Arduino Language:
Arduino programming language can be divided in three main parts: functions, values (variables and constants), and structure.
As for the ESP32, Espressif writes & supports their own Arduino core:
https://esp32.com/viewforum.php?f=19
https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32
For die-hard C++ types that wish to live in a world untouched by Arduino, Espressif supports that very well:
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/api-reference/index.html
So, in my mind, ESP32 is just a welcomed microcontroller chip usually provided on a breakout that happens to fit into the Arduino paradigm but not required to be included to have relevance as a powerful microcontroller.
Won't be a complete ESP32 thread until @Idahowalker put's his 2 cents in.
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Of course, follow the money trail.
They get cheap ARM chips provided they don't use chips from competitors as the main processor.
ARM hasn't made a clone of the ESP32 so the RP2040 with a u-blox Tensilica helper chip is the current workaround.
I wonder if this ARM agreement also prevents them from using RISC-V as the main processor?
The court case in 2015 showed that Arduino is a "make money" company, just like every other normal company. As far as I can tell their business model is selling inexpensive boards at high prices based on the reputation of the Arduino brand name. I have no idea what volume discounts they offer to educational buyers.
Their product portfolio is still a mystery to me, and I have no idea how buyers in the educational space choose what board to buy in volume, other than going for the cheapest.
Seems that all "for profit" companies must have a positive cash flow to survive and thrive.
I do not believe you are considering the large cost of designing, testing, integrating, manufacturing, distributing, and supporting a multitude of products.
Indeed so.
And of course there will be many who choose to buy cheap boards (not manufactured by Arduino) and then come on these forums for support.
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++1
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Arduino is a brand. Boards are sold under this brand, and an open-source IDE is offered under that brand.
Arduino is also a group of companies, which sells boards and develops an open-source IDE.
Your question presents a false dychotomy and is far too philosophical for my taste. But it is fairly evident that the boards have a working revenue stream, and the IDE doesn't. But the sales of the boards are, of course, predicated on working software for them.
I believe a lot of Arduino's relevance to the MCU market really is rooted in the Arduino "brand", which used to be almost synonymous with hobbyist-friendly MCUs. Right now, I do not believe that Arduino has the best boards on the market (I don't even believe their boards have the best value-for-money on the market), and frankly I think the Arduino IDE was outdated even back in 2013 when I got my first Uno. But having a combination of boards and software that "just works" in combination with one another is a big selling point itself.
So, in response to @mikb55's question on whether Arduino will stay relevant - I don't know. They certainly have inertia going for them, but the market is getting increasingly crowded and companies like Adafruit, wo have been a pretty big part of the scene for a long time, now push towards developing their own boards, many of which seem very enticing, and they are a lot less beholden to the weird quasistandards (like the Arduino Uno's exact pinyout) that somehow keep getting regurgitated on the Arduino side.
Then again, Arduino has never really been a shining beacon of technical innovation (cough see also: Wiring /cough) so... who knows.
There's something to be said about this thread appearing in a forum paid for by the sale of Arduino boards 
Feels kind of like going to France and being upset that you cannot get a bacon cheeseburger at a traditional local restaurant.
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Personally, having bought several Arduino boards and thus contributed to the financial survival of this forum, I do not believe I am obliged to be uncritical towards the Arduino company or its products.
More like going to France, ending up in a restaurant that is kind of mediocre, kind of pricey, has its menu written in Wingdings, and then getting told off for writing a review that is a bit lukewarm.
A great deal of effort has been made on IDE 2.0 RC and there is a web-IDE. The rework from Arduino IDE 0022 to IDE 1.5 benefitted the 3rd party board manufacturers and 3rd party cores. This alone in my mind shows a company trying to be relevant and supporting the Arduino community even when that community does not directly support Arduino by purchasing their hardware.
Ladyada (Adafruit) have been involved with Arduino in a symbiotic nature for a long time; she has been most influential to the degree that her libraries and sensors drive sales of microcontroller board sales: surely some portion of those sales are derived thru educational channels.
Another company in the UK, Revolution Education (the PICAXE folks) run a similar hardware/software business with bulk sales to education.
I would strongly suggest to hobbyists to buy into Official hardware if for no other reason than to have known-good hardware for testing code. An Uno/Mega, a Due/Zero, and a WiFi/BT board in the MKR series covers a lot of territory. I've been doing projects for over 11 years and I still hang-on to 2 Uno and 2 Mega2560 ... one each to develop and one each for hardware validation of issues. Being able to test my code on identical but separate hardware is like walking a high-wire with a safety net... a comforting feeling.
Ray
Sure, but IDE 2.0 is still a pretty bare-bones experience. Don't get me wrong, it's better than IDE 1, but to me it feels "too little, too late". Doesn't mean I can't work with it, doesn't mean I won't use it, but... eh.
Right, but my point is: Now that Adafruit increasingly pushes their own boards, this relationship may become a lot less symbiotic. They say that competition is good for business, of course.
That's something I can get behind, I started with an Uno and it was a lot more seamless than other microcontrollers. But I disagree a bit with the wording of "official", as if Arduino builds "official" microcontrollers and Adafruit, the Teensy guys (PJRC?), Espressif, ... aren't. I feel like we need to distinguish between cheap Arduino clones on one hand, and boards that actually try and innovate and offer things that Arduino doesn't.
It may ... "may" is a really BIG word: reminds me of entropy.
Adafruit seems to be pushing CircuitPython.
I like it.