Not a big surprise, China struggles to create anything new. It’s the same with russia, all their current “best tech” is functioning only because of western components.
Why make new tech when consumer tech do trick? Seems like a decent idea to use a Raspberry Pi or other consumer electronics for this sort of thing because they knew there was a nearly 100% chance that some or all of the balloons would be intercepted by the US government. Rather than reveal secret spy tech, they only revealed things that we were already familiar with, and they still likely got some data sent back while the balloon was flying.
For the record, I’m not trying for this to look like a pro-China thing, I just think the real answer is something between inability and practicality rather than conclusively being a sign that they can’t make good tech.
That’s a fair point, but even their consumer tech is still using western designs.
