Well there's dev boards and then there's dev boards.

Dev boards for hardware developers are usually hideously expensive and usually broken in many different ways. They are products that are in development so they'll have all manner of weird debug interfaces and dip switches for settings. It's not unusual for you to have to write your own BSP just to get it to boot!

That said once these things get cleaned up they often become the basis for actual products.


The beagle board started a new trend because it was a different kind of board altogether. It's targeted at software developers and is more aimed at starting an ecosystem. These became available once the chip was on sale so they actually work. The biggest change was the price, they cost a lot less money.

It was a good trick. Everyone does boards like this now, and there's more coming...