[Arizhel]

>But there are a lot of people who build their own special purpose devices,

Those are called "hobbyists".

>and all the alpha/beta testing happens with manually soldered hardware, since prepping a machine for just 10 boards is way too expensive

This is absolutely wrong. You can't manually place BGAs with any accuracy. I work in an R&D environment; our electronics are custom-built in-house at very low volumes, and they do use machines even for a one-off. Some parts can be fixed manually if they didn't get reflowed right, but BGAs cannot.

Even if you're doing boards with nothing smaller than SOICs, even there it's simpler and easier to just get a Kapton stencil and use solder paste, though you can of course pick-and-place with tweezers.

[erikb]

I know a few single digit million dollar companies who do that. I wouldn't call it a hobby if you have 50 employees.