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The other thing to consider is that these machines cost money and have a write-off lifetime, I wouldn't be surprised if they're designed and purchased for a lifetime of 10, 15 years, with only some consumables like new probes and cables every once in a while.

The article is a bit of a puff piece for Butterfly and Exo. MEMS address a problem, but not necessarily the hard one for portable ultrasound. There are plenty of handheld plain old PZT transducer based devices out there.

GE had a handheld model that they featured in some feel-good “we are GE” ad in the late 2000s/2010s.

I was at Sonosite in the mid 2000s, that was that entire company. Custom analog ASIC based, but portable tablets.

Me too! That's the only reason I know laptop-sized portable ultrasound machines exist. I had an internship there one summer where I wrote automation software for the M-Turbo.