Cost of single-board PCs

This is the crux of the matter. Not only is the Cisco router unable to provide the features that the SBC does out of the box, but the target market for each is radically different. When you can't get your code to work on the Cisco box, who are you going to call at Cisco for support? Does Cisco make any guarantees about long-term support or availability? Is the SOHO router specced for temperature extremes (like, over 35C or under 0C)?

It all comes down to quantity. I opine that if JKmicro could move the same quantity that Cisco does, the price of their boards would decrease accordingly.

You asked for a cheap device that ran DOS and supported Turbo Pascal 3 - I suggested one. You don't like the quantity one price, and that I can't help you with. Buy 10 thousand and you'll probably like the price better.

But if you're correct that intended market and detailed feature set shouldn't make a difference on pricing, I highly recommend you start your own SBC company and make a ton of money. Or maybe it's more complicated than you think?

Kelly

Functionality of a given example is not the point. The cost of producing it is...

I'd guess that if they offered a modern design they could reduce the price at the same time they increase the functionality by more than an order of magnitude.

No, the OP did that. Like you, I am merely adding perspective to the discussion.

Certainly that is true.

Or maybe not...

The SBC model was invented some years back, and currently seems stagnated at a level that was appropriate a decade past.

But we now see everything from ovens to telephones that incorporate the same basic idea which generated the "SBC model". It won't be long until the same technologies are applied to SBC's, and the idea of paying $100 for a board with Kb of RAM running DOS on a 40MHz cpu will be the joke it should be.

Functionality is exactly the point, because functionality is based on market size and price depends on quantity. There's a huge consumer market for the Cisco router you mentioned - they likely ship hundreds of thousands of those in the products 18 month life. If you can use that router for your next project, great; be advised that you're getting a good price because for every hobbyist there are 100x customers who will just use it as designed. The mass market is subsidizing your cost.

If you want to reduce any electronic product down to the cost of equivalent transistors, and use (say) the transistor price of a mainstream CPU as a metric, you'll find most electronics cost more than they "should".

Aside: I had a boss once who believed that part price "should" be determined based on die area. So when he didn't like the pricing on a Zilog Z180, he had the chip professionally decapped, measured the area of the die, and then renegotiated the unit price based on his calculations. I assume he got a better price based on this exercise.

Specifically, what would you change in the design? The devil is in the details - let's talk details.

The relatively low sales volume of general purpose SBCs means that they will always cost more than custom built dedicated purpose designs.

It's all about the trade off between general purpose off-the-shelf hardware and purpose-built custom harware. If you don't have the quantities to justify the NRE for a custom product, you're going to pay for a general-purpose board with features you don't want.

Kelly

You COULD call..

Perfect!