This thing far exceeds the capacity of that machine, costs several orders of magnitude less, and FITS IN A FUCKING MATCHBOOK. Jeez. Get some perspective.
If you're trying to stay below the magic $99 retail price point though, you may be in for a challenge. Do you need a battery? Is that chip antenna good enough or do you need to have a better one made? Plastics? Power supply? Those DF40-80 connectors alone are going to account for north of $1 in manufacturing quantities. And after all that, you still have to pay for whatever it is your product actually does.
When I'm designing products, I sweat over every dollar, and big ticket items like this really need to be justified. If I don't need 8GB of flash, I don't buy it. Likewise quad core - how big a battery am I going to need to drive that thing for whatever my requierment is? Could I save $5 on the battery by dropping to single core (and save another $1 there too)?
As with anything, I think the use case for this amounts to "It Depends". I think the price point for this puts it out of range of the IOT space, and it is over-spec'd for a basic RF bridge type application (plus all the issues that go with trying to control noise when you don't own the chip layout). Maybe as the driver for a custom touchpad or something like that. Suffice it to say that I think it has a market, but that's probably not competing in the IOT space, and likely not the prototype space either.
$.02
If you can spend (just) a month or two designing, debugging, and procuring a cost-optimized variant of this that costs $25 instead, your time spent on that is equivalent to just buying a thousand of these. One of the big things in the "it depends" question is how many of these things you plan to sell. If it's less than thousands, buy modules.
The Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 for example has the exact same SoC, same 8GB MMC, Wifi/BT, and is $20. Not saying that this board necessarily isn't worth it but clearly there is stiff competition in the SBC space and a lot of the boards are extremely cheap. The size is an advantage. It has mezzanine connectors instead of rows of headers. They claim they'll actually keep the kernel up to date which is a major problem with many of these SBCs, though I am rather skeptical given that they're using Allwinner chips. They cannot magically produce a new kernel without sources from Allwinner.
What are you imagining using this for? That seems like a really low price.
This assumes that your SoC vendor actually cares about you as a customer and provides you all documentation, erratas, and EOL notices in a timely manner and not considers you a liability that due to small volumes (<1M) will never earn someone in the SoC company any real bonuses.
I'm making a living developing big and small embedded systems for customers as a software developer, so I see this mostly from the outside, and depending on the experience of your team and how good your contacts to your component suppliers are, you may be able to speed up the process.
But for sure it takes a lot of effort to get to the stage where you have what this $49 SOM gives you. $49 times 10k units is quickly eaten into, and then have you have to consider what value you put on time to market.
who would even bother, the rpi zero is $5.
The pi zero has no wireless, a single-core ARM11 CPU, no on-board flash storage, less than half as many GPIO pins, requires a higher supply voltage, etc etc.
The pi 3 is much more comparable, and at a much more comparable price, especially after you add in the price of the SD card, which is necessary. Pi 3 is also much bigger, and, I'm guessing, draws more power.
Stil I agree, its not really comparable. The Pis is mostly learning/teaching tool. I can see using this in a product directly. Something I would grab when I needed something more than an ESP.
Regarding the Emlid board, yes, it's way overpriced, but it doesn't seem a product aimed at makers -though it also tries to sell itself as such-. Once you add the board to make it useable the price will grow a lot. To me it has its uses as an industrial module manufacturers can stick into their products. I personally would rather get a NanoPi NEO2 plus its dock at a total cost of $28, or 10 more for 1GB RAM, and the OrangePI also has some boards with similar characteristics, but that's a personal choice: Nano/OrangePI boards are wonderful boards for makers and experimenters but if you're building something critical then you should look elsewhere. If the Emlid board satisfies safety requirements then its price is totally justified (and selling it as a makers board could do bad PR), otherwise they should make a breadboard friendly version at a lower price.
The direct competitor is the RPi3 and costs $35 which is $15 less and it doesnt require a breakout board to access it's IO. The eMMC is the only interesting aspect about this board.
SD card manufacturers can get away with using the shittiest flash and controllers they can find because SD cards can be replaced. eMMC is not user serviceable and therefore actually needs to be... you know... reliable.
This board is clearly not for hobbyists. It's intended for hardware startups that will design their own custom breakout boards.
The Pi Zero is easily obtainable now Adafruit have it for $5+shipping in the US, Kiwi-electronics have it for €5+shipping in Europe and Pimoroni have it for £5+shipping in the UK. Hardly a myth.
Also, PIs aren't so solid. Definitely not good for industrial use.
They will only sell you one of each per visit at that price.
Last time I bought a Pi Zero from them, I paid $0.99 for it.[2] Once again, they would only sell one per visit at that price when they were running that sale.
You aren't going to get enough for any kind of production run at that price, but they're not exactly unobtanium.
[0](http://www.microcenter.com/product/486575/Zero_W) [1](http://www.microcenter.com/product/486498/Zero_v13_Developme...) [2](https://i.imgur.com/uLf8bi8.png)
What you don't get however, is the ability to purchase them in any bulk quantity at that price. However the bulk price is still much less than $49.
[0]: https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-zero.html [1]: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero [2]: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3400
Since you can't buy more than one, "shipping" is just a way to get the price up. It's like those eBay sellers who sell a $10 item for $1 and charge $12 for shipping, per item.
At least $11 and then there's shipping. and limits of one per customer.
Right now my Pi Zero is collecting dust because I know I can't find a second one easily. Meanwhile, I buy ESP8266s by the tens and use them for every throwaway purpose.