Raspberry Pi Sales Approach 4 Million

Eben Upton's reboot of the spirit of the BBC Micro in the form of the Raspberry Pi would have been an interesting project even if it had only been useful in the world of education. Upton wanted, after all, to give the kind of hands-on, low-level interaction with computing devices that he saw had gone missing in schools. Plenty of rPis are now in that educational, inspirational role, but it turns out that the world was waiting (or at least ready) for a readily usable, cheap, all-in-one computer, and the Raspberry Pi arrived near the front of a wave that now includes many other options. Sales boomed, and we've mentioned a few of the interesting milestones, like the millionth unit made in the UK and the two-millionth unit overall. Now, according to TechCrunch the Raspberry Pi is getting close to 4 million units sold, having just passed 3.8 million, as reported in a tweet. If you have a Raspberry Pi, what are you using it for now, and what would you like to see tweaked in future versions?

Comments

That's easy!

[Type44Q]

what would you like to see tweaked in future versions?

No closed-source binaries, obviously!

Alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be like RaspPi, but without the USB problem?

I am building a word processor (a glorified typewriter), so I do not need for extra processor speed or memory, but USB packet loss manifesting itself as stuck(!) keys is a pain in the posterior.

Leaving 5,000 doing something interesting.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

3.995 million of them are currently collecting dust in the desk drawers of neckbeards.

Leaving 5,000 of them doing something interesting and useful - and probably something that couldn't be done affordably with a brain that cost $800 or more.

If the computer costs just chump change, who CARES if most of them end up gathering dust? The cost of that is trivial, which the benefit of those that DO get used is substantial.

It's like pencil sharpeners (back before cheap automatic pencils): They spend almost all of their time idle. But they're so cheap that it makes more financial sense to have one in every office than to have one for the company and a department scheduling its time-sharing.

(That analogy was acutally used, to get executives to rent a clue, during the transition from central timesharing systems to ubiquitus desktop machines. When a computer costs several million and needs a clean room and dedicated hierarchy, it makes sense to have one and spend a lot of effort rationing it out. When one costs a thousand bucks it's far cheaper to put them on every desk and leave most of them horribly under-utilized. Such a price drop creates a qualitative change to resource allocation strategies.)