Economies of scale. If they sold hundreds of thousands ESP32 or Arduinos every day, their price would likely fall down to €1 per complete board.
> why aren't we seeing feature-rich dev boards based on the same platforms ?
Because those platforms are closed as hell and their manufacturers have no intention of publishing enough technical data to allow developers to write Open Source drivers.
That's the reason why the engineers at Pine64 had to design the PinePhone from scratch to make it run a real Linux distribution instead of using already available proprietary boards that would indeed be a lot faster and cheaper, but also would be restricted to run only Android with closed device drivers and the same crappy untrustworthy software that plagues cellphones today.
Economies of scale. If they sold hundreds of thousands ESP32 or Arduinos every day, their price would likely fall down to €1 per complete board.
> why aren't we seeing feature-rich dev boards based on the same platforms ?
Because those platforms are closed as hell and their manufacturers have no intention of publishing enough technical data to allow developers to write Open Source drivers.
That's the reason why the engineers at Pine64 had to design the PinePhone from scratch to make it run a real Linux distribution instead of using already available proprietary boards that would indeed be a lot faster and cheaper, but also would be restricted to run only Android with closed device drivers and the same crappy untrustworthy software that plagues cellphones today.