PICs - Playground or 'serious' microcontroller

[Art]

Laugh out loud! People make money with brains, work, or gutsy risk taking
whatever their tools are, chips aren't much good on their own really,
what a silly question.
And proof ha ha.

[leisryan]

Does anybody in this forum, still go to Curches nowadays? hehehe kiddin'

[Ryan7777]

you'll never please this guy..
he's one of those people who think it takes at least a $20,000 piece of equipment to be sure that there is no ripple on a $10 regulated output wal-wart... i can tell you VERY important things to the worlds safety, (or your harm, if your a bad guy) contain PIC micros.... or whatever is at hand to do the job and get the job done for as cheap as possible.. you wouldnt believe the number of obsolete components in things you would think should be top of the line!! (use your imagination..). the point is, a good engineer or technician will make anything work perfectly if its important enough.. using whatever.. and how about radar? guess what, they still use... VACUUM TUBES.. yes, good ol' wwII era valves.. sure there are things that are brand spanking new out there that can do the same job.. but not as well at the power level's needed.. and why all this? because the war business doesnt drive the market.. consumer goods do. so while you enjoy your ipod with its 2000000 GHz processor spitting out your timberlake... remember that there ARE things out there that have no where near the power and do much, much more important jobs... that have to work no matter what... it all just depends on the need at hand. and look at the number of ipod failures.. lockups, bad firmware... every microcontroller can fail or have problems.

[presario1425]

selbstdual, would you consider Nike and iPod's engineers to be professionals? If your answer is yes, then check this out:

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/pre...iPod-Internals

They seem to think a PIC16F688 is ok.

What about you?