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Raspberry Pi Gets Its Own Brick-and-Mortar Retail Store (venturebeat.com)
The Raspberry Pi, believe it or not, now has its very own retail store. From a report: Located on the first floor of the Grand Arcade in Cambridge, U.K., the Raspberry Pi Store is open through the day, every day, and sells everything from Raspberry Pi microcomputers and accessories, to branded coffee mugs, soft toys, and more. [...] Despite its popularity -- more than 19 million Raspberry Pi units have been sold since 2012 -- the Raspberry Pi still feels a little niche to merit its own dedicated retail store. Indeed, most people who would be interested in building their own electronic gadgets from scratch are likely well-versed in the wonders of online retail. But conversely, that is likely the same reason why the Raspberry Pi Foundation wants its own space in the physical retail realm: it needs a new audience.
And much like the USB design of the Raspberry PI, there will be multiple entrances to the building which will then funnel all traffic through a single door.
Yes, they should have bought the former department store next door with 50 times the floor space and 8 independent doors. Except that would have cost a lot more and rendered the whole project financially impossible.
The Pi has a USB bottleneck (and falls short to being totally open source) because they used a dirt-cheap, off-the-shelf system-on-a-chip in order to meet their prime requirement: its so cheap that you can happily mod it, let the kids play with it etc. without any drama if/when somebody lets the magic smoke out. Or just buy a new one for your next project rather than have to tear apart your last project to retrieve the expensive computer.
It would be great if there were some ARM equivalent of generic x86 PC hardware - with proper USB, Ethernet, PCIe, M.2. SATA etc. and standardised firmware/drivers - but that's not what the Pi was intended to be, and is unlikely to cost $35 or less...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Despite its popularity -- more than 19 million Raspberry Pi units have been sold since 2012 -- the Raspberry Pi still feels a little niche to merit its own dedicated retail store.
That is true, there are only two kinds of people in the world, those that own no Raspberry PIs, and those that own several dozen Pis - so that puts the maximal user base at well under 1 million world-wide. Now, conveniently, all those Raspberry Pi owners are clustered in high-density first-world cities, so this was an obvious next step for the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Ken