He explains the difference here:
reply> I can pick up H417s on the official WCH store on Aliexpress with free shipping and no verification hullabalu.
I think the point is that anyone can make these chips, so there are Chinese sellers who just throw them in a padded envelope and send them out without bothering with all the stuff "serious" vendors do. And because they're cheap enough, if doesn't matter if some get lost in the mail.
Sure, but a quick search of AliExpress shows that you can get lots of ARM chips from them too, and I assume those are without any "verification hullabalu" as well, no?
replyI’d really like an explanation here if the author is reading. And how does shipping cost scale with quantity? Can you get that to be small per unit on big orders?
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