Raspberry Pi Five Million

What a lot of Pi and all for such a rapidly market disruptive and IT education enhancing development:

RaspberryPi.org: Five million sold!

Yesterday we received some figures which confirmed something we’ve suspected for a few weeks now: we’ve sold over five million Raspberry Pis.

The Pi has gone from absolutely nothing just under three years ago, to becoming the fastest-selling British computer. (We still have Sir Alan Sugar to beat on total sales numbers – if you include the PCW word processor in the figures, Amstrad sold 8 million computers between 1984 and 1997.)

We roll this picture out every time we have a sales update: this is the first batch of Raspberry Pis we ever had made, around this time three years ago…

The Guardian: Raspberry Pi becomes best selling British computer

Sales of cheap, credit card-sized units top 5m says company, eclipsing the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the 1980s…

… Demand for the basic computer was first driven by hobbyists, but is now bought by educational institutions across the world and the industrial sector, in which the Raspberry Pi has been used to power various machines and control systems…

NetworkWorld: 10 Reasons why the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is a killer product

… Not only will the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B run all of the operating systems its predecessors ran, it will also be able to run Microsoft’s Windows 10 … for free! Yep, Microsoft has decided that it wants to be part of the Raspberry Pi world and for a good reason; a huge number of kids will have their first experience of computing on RPi boards and what better way to gain new acolytes?

This may be the best improvement of the lot: For the added compute power, increased RAM, and drop-in compatibility there’s no extra cost! The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is priced at $35, the same as its predecessor!

The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is one of the best (quite possibly, *the* best) single board computers available and, given the huge popularity of the Raspberry Pi family (now with more than 500,000 Raspberry Pi 2 Model B’s sold and around 5 million Pi’s in total if you include all models), it’s one of the best understood and supported products of its kind. Whether it’s for hobbyist, educational, or commercial use, the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is an outstanding product.

The Wall Street Journal: Raspberry Pi 2 Review: A $35 Computer Can Do a Heck of a Lot

An open-source computer that encourages you to look inside…

… This week I’ve been using the $35 Raspberry Pi 2, a bare-bones Linux computer no bigger than a juice box. And I’ve rediscovered something I had forgotten: the thrill of tinkering with a machine and its software…

ZDNet: Raspberry Pi, oh my: From classrooms to the space station

Well, this is starting to look sort of like “Jamie’s Mostly Raspberry Pi Stuff”, but that’s not intentional. There are just a lot of interesting things going on with the RPi at the moment…

… The thing that really caught my attention in the Pi Blog, though, was the Astro Pi Mission Update. First, it’s pretty cool that a Raspberry Pi is going to the International Space Station along with the British astronaut Tim Peake. But what is really cool, and I mean completely off the scale in coolness, is that UK schools can have the exact same hardware that will be used for experiments on the space station! That is without a doubt one of the most wonderful things I have ever heard in my life. Think about the educational potential that has…

… There is also an interesting description in the blog about what they are having to go through to get the Raspberry Pi approved for space flight.

The icing on the case is the Astro Pi competition. UK schools can enter and submit programs, and experiments, and the winning submission will be taken on the mission and performed on the space station. Live. Maybe even with a live, interactive link to the school system…

Education Week: Tiny Raspberry Pi Computer Hits Big Sales Milestone

This week, the group that created the Raspberry Pi announced that it had sold more than 5 million units—a great leap from the 10,000 computers the founders had said they initially hoped to sell…

… In 2008, a group of computer scientists at the University of Cambridge in Great Britain formed the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charity group aimed at improving students’ computer programming skills. The way to do so, they decided, was to create a small, cheap computer for programming practice… The foundation now provides free teacher training on how to use the computers in classrooms, as well as a host of educational resources, including coding tutorials, activities, and project ideas. The $1.5 million education fund offers grants for projects that better students’ understanding of computing. The devices are now being used in classrooms around the world…

Shame about the very “narrow” comment at the end of that article! More education needed there?…!

Should this post be renamed for how news of the RasPi has reached varied parts of the cybersphere not normally seen! 🙂

Here’s to a new generation of IT!! 😉