Reply #2: but your computer 15 years ago won't do the things you expect a computer to do today

[pokerfan]

Still...

The immediate comparison potential customers will make is to the oft-mentioned Raspberry Pi, a $25 barebones board which famously ran Quake 3 at 1600×1200 with 4x AA at about 20fps. The diminutive Raspberry Pi is a very different animal than the BeagleBone – while the folks out at BeagleBoard are attempting to make a utilitarian board with multiple expansion opportunities, Raspberry Pi’s goal is only to provide computing at the lowest possible price.

Both solutions run full-fledged Linux. The BeagleBone ships with a 2GB microSD card pre-loaded with the Angstrom Distribution, node.js, and the Cloud9 IDE. As of early November, there is no official word what will come with the Raspberry Pi.

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On the other end of the spectrum, the BeagleBone sports two 46-pin, two-row female expansion headers, gigabit Ethernet, microSD, onboard LEDs, a USB port with serial/JTAG conversion – and strangely, no standard monitor outputs, relying instead on its 46-pin headers for multiplexed output to LCDs. Simply put, this will not even replace your mom’s PIII desktop, this is a different niche. There is the $149 BeagleBoard-xM, which sports a higher clockspeed, dedicated HD-video capable DSP, and DVI-D, but it does so on a larger board with a larger price.

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/11/02/say-hello-to-beaglebone-a-preview