Raspberry Pi Sales Hit Two Million
Raspberry Pi Foundation says popularity of the device comes as “a bit of a shock”
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced it has shipped two million miniature Linux computers, just nine months after celebrating its first million units.
This means Raspberry Pi has become more popular than the legendary BBC Micro, built for the Computer Literacy Project in 1981, which achieved sales figures of about 1.5 million.
The two millionth Raspberry Pi was sold sometime between 24 October and 31 October. By pure coincidence, it could have been presented to Prince Andrew, who visited the Foundation’s headquarters, better known as the “Pi Towers”, on Halloween.
The Raspberry Pi team marked the occasion by posting the story on its blog, along with a look back to Febuary 2012, when first ever shipment of 2000 of the miniature computers
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation was established in 2011, specifically to develop a cheap Linux computer for education and inspire a new generation of British innovators.
The machine can be connected to a TV or monitor via HDMI. It can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, including office work, Internet browsing and high-definition video playback – all possible through a circuit board the size of a credit card, which costs just over £20.
The tiny computer features a 700MHz ARM11 processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and either 256MB or 512MB of RAM. There is no hard disk on board; the computer uses an SD card instead, but includes two USB ports which can connect to external storage. Raspberry Pi can work with several popular Linux distributions, including Debian, GNU/Linux, Ubuntu and Fedora.
The first 2000 computers were produced in China, and arrived to the UK in February 2012, packed on a pallet in boxes of 50. “It struck us that every single Raspberry Pi in that pallet represents 1000 of the Raspberry Pis that are spread around the world today,” wrote the Foundation’s marketing manager Liz Upton.
In September 2012, all of the Raspberry Pi manufacturing was transferred to the Sony Technology Centre in Pencoed, Wales. A year later, the UK factory had produced a million units and so far, the demand only seems to increase.
“We never thought we’d be where we are today when we started this journey: it’s down to you, our amazing community, and we’re very, very lucky to have you. Thanks!” added Upton.
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