Arduino's have always been a little pricy for the hardware you get. I think a lot of what you pay for (at least for a regular, non pro, Arduino) is the ease of use and the eco system.

That being said, do you have any examples of other entries in this category that are suitable for industrial / automotive use?

There's little reason to commit a whole Arduino board to a project when you can easily flash the Arduino bootloader onto an ATMega and embed one in your gadget. I think I own exactly two Arduinos: an UNO SMD edition that I use for flashing bootloaders on ATMegas and programming ATTinys, and a regular UNO that I stuck a ZIF socket on that I use to program ATMegas.

Yeah you pay for the hobby convenience of flashing over USB on the regular board which is a nice convenience when you're just noodling around with a project not intended to become a product. (Or doing rough PoC prototypes where iteration speed is important).

Definitely, looks like others are taking note. All of TIs newish launchpads seem to have a built in usb debugger/programmer. Pretty sure that was a direct response to the popularity of Arduino.

Eh, TI has been doing the in circuit programming route on their BASIC Stamp boards since before USB was popular. I don't think they had anything special for debugging though

> The price seems very high for the category.

Does anyone else remember when a Keil C 8051 at 20MHz devkit would cost you several hundred dollars for the hardware, and then several hundred dollars for the compiler?

I remember... it was like... what? 10 years ago? Not actually very long ago...

the product starts a 49. it's an industrial product with industrial temperature grade parts. it's also a quantity 1 price. if you buy in bulk directly the price comes down