This seems to be pretty true in general. SBC companies are not competing with Raspberry Pi because their software is quite a bit behind (boot loaders, linux kernel support, etc). Particle released a really cool dev board recently, but the software is lacking. Qualcomm struggled with their new CPU launch with poor support as well. It sometimes takes a while for new Intel processor features to be supported in the toolchains, kernel, and then get used in software.

Aside from that, I think of Apple as a hardware company that must write software to sell their devices, maybe this isn't true anymore but that's how I used to view them. Maintaining and updating as much software as Apple owns is no small task either.