Personal computers are intended for general use. They can run a wide
range of applications – games, business apps, that sort of thing.

Embedded systems, on the other hand, are typically designed for a
single purpose. Think of a calculator, for example, or the logic in
vending machines. (Of course, some embedded systems are becoming more
general now, like personal digital assistants a).

Personal computers

On PCs, you can usually assume that someone

Although crashes and data loss seem to be part of our everyday
computing experience, people expect embedded systems to be reliable.
Imagine an embedded system that crashes! What if your phone crashed
and had to be rebooted all the time? People expect features,
reliability, and all for a low price.

One of the things about embedded development is that the process is a
little bit longer. It’s not the usual edit, compile, run cycle. It’s
edit, compile, burn to flash, run.

And of course if you go into embedded development, you’ll probably
have to deal with different architectures. For example, you’ll learn
about the quirks of conditional ARM.