Edison was pretty annoying to work with in my experience.
To use the Edison CPU (without their Arduino-like breakout board) on your own hardware you needed a fine-pitch connector that was more or less impossible to solder in a typical home workshop. The Yocto Linux was annoying from a tinker's perspective because it was focused around building static firmware images and not like Raspberry Pi where you ssh in and apt-get away.
This all didn't make much sense for a product marketed to makers/hobbyists. More or less the only benefit you got from Edison was being x86. You could compile a static binary on your laptop, scp it over and it would just work without messing with cross-compilation etc. But that really wasn't worth all the other annoyances IMHO.
More or less the only benefit you got from Edison was being x86.
...and Intel missed the point that x86 without the rest of the PC isn't that great. I suspect if the Edison was actually PC-compatible (to the point of e.g. being able to boot DOS and older Windows and run their applications) it would've had far more popularity (retro-gaming, etc.) than yet-another-maker-toy.
But then it'd need to bring in a DOS compatible RTC, a CGA/MDA/EGA/VGA output, audio out (PC speaker or Sound Blaster?), joystick port, serial port (or PS/2 emulation from the USB bus). Should the SD card pretend to be an IDE hard disk?
It just needs to have the base AT system board components at their usual places (which can easily be integrated into a SoC[1]) and a useful bus for expansion like PCI(e) or even (E)ISA. Video, audio, and other peripherals can be external.
The Edison module connector could've easily housed a PCI or
ISA (which slow, but more "maker friendly" because the speeds are low enough that standard TTL ICs can be used) bus, but all they put on it was USB and GPIO.
To use the Edison CPU (without their Arduino-like breakout board) on your own hardware you needed a fine-pitch connector that was more or less impossible to solder in a typical home workshop. The Yocto Linux was annoying from a tinker's perspective because it was focused around building static firmware images and not like Raspberry Pi where you ssh in and apt-get away.
This all didn't make much sense for a product marketed to makers/hobbyists. More or less the only benefit you got from Edison was being x86. You could compile a static binary on your laptop, scp it over and it would just work without messing with cross-compilation etc. But that really wasn't worth all the other annoyances IMHO.