Dev Kit (and Tools) Pricing Disparities

I find it interesting (and, at times, frustrating) when I come across a vendor who wants to charge $500-$1500 for a development kit, particularly when it's a dev kit for an inexpensive microprocessor.  Of these I've run across, it's never been the case of "well, this kit has all sorts of things which warrant the high cost".  I've seen small startups, who need 4 or 5 dev kits, change their design/architecture decision because of exorbitant dev kit prices (seriously simple math: 5 x $1500 > 5 x $150).  Also, when the dev kit price is high, it makes one wonder what other costs may be lurking ahead (additional toolset license costs, nickel-and-dime structure for purchasing code/stack modules, etc.).  Certainly vendors with lower dev kit costs can have other fees, duh.  It's just a bit much to swallow paying a lot for a dev kit when the microprocessor device will cost you $10 or less.  And with the tools, I absolutely *love* it when a vendor has a free version for me to use that allows code of several KB in size to not require a license.  I think Motorola/Freescale did really well when, back in the day, they started offering CodeWarrior in a model like this.  Tactics like these make products more accessible to small startups, to poor college students, to the professional developer interested in tinkering.  Make no mistake, I'm *happy* to pay for good tools and advanced dev kits once my company has made a decision.  But it can be difficult these days to try and get approval for $1500 to buy a board to "try out" a candidate microprocessor, particularly when there's a suitable candidate with a $100 (or less) dev kit.  I'm just sayin'...

Hey, a Browser-based IDE... Wait, What?

A good friend of mine clued me onto an interesting offering from the folks over at mbed: a browser-based IDE for their ARM-based dev boards!  Appears to support syntax highlighting and some version control for your source files, among other things.  Neat!  Now if they could just figure a way to integrate a debugger...

TI Still Selling MSP430 Dev Kit for $4.30!

I was pleasantly surprised to see Texas Instruments is still selling their MSP430 LaunchPad dev kit (part of their "value line") for $4.30 (plus shipping).  Great way to affordably tinker around with a handy 16-bit microcontroller, and it comes with Code Composer Studio, a decent (well, for the bit I've tinkered with mine, it seems decent) IDE, too, for creating, compiling, and debugging.  I believe there's also a free version of an IAR IDE available, but I haven't tried it.

Now if I could just get a Rapsberry Pi distributors to sell me a model B board...