"This one caught me off guard. Arduino, the company most of us associate with microcontrollers and blinking LEDs, have released an SBC."
Uh, what were they doing before? No, seriously, given that every laptop ever and most legacy free desktops, not to speak of the 1U servers you find in data centers use a single PCB, what makes a SBC a SBC?
I've seen Raspberry Pi and the like being referred to as 'open frame computers', which I thought describes them more fittingly.
If I stripped my old laptop down to a single PCB, it certainly wouldn't boot, it would be missing RAM, and storage. My PCs would have no RAM, no CPU, no storage, potentially no GPU, and most of the servers would be the same. The IPMI/iDRAC etc would boot up I guess if we count that, and we'd potentially get into the BIOS if a device has soldered RAM, but M.2/SATA attached storage or something?
We could debate about strict definitions all day, but I think the vast majority of people differentiate between a Raspberry Pi 5 (not a great example given it needs storage, pick anything with eMMC if you truly want everything on a single board) running a full Debian-based OS, and a Pico running MicroPython (or whatever your poison of choice is) and one task at a time, at least I do when it comes to this kind of thing!
Uh, what were they doing before? No, seriously, given that every laptop ever and most legacy free desktops, not to speak of the 1U servers you find in data centers use a single PCB, what makes a SBC a SBC?
I've seen Raspberry Pi and the like being referred to as 'open frame computers', which I thought describes them more fittingly.