
The Raspberry Pi: One year since launch, one million sold - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/the-raspberry-pi-one-year-since-launch-one-million-sold/
======
CrLf
What a bunch of naysayers...

The Pi isn't the most modern board out there. It isn't the most powerful one
or the smallest. It isn't the most open one... But, who cares?

The Pi is readily available from a number of distributors in a number of
countries. It is cheap enough. It runs a plain linux distribution that can be
easily installed on a plain SD card by anyone with half a brain. It has
(documented) GPIO pins.

It serves its purpose just fine. People are curious about it (even if they are
attracted by the media-center red herring), they buy it and they learn
something.

Many of these people never used Linux, some never programmed anything. Maybe
they just mess with it for a while and then put it away.

In the end, it's a net gain.

BTW, for those of you touting supposedly "better" alternatives. Why haven't
these alternatives taken off?

And also, why hasn't Beta totally killed VHS... it was so much better...

~~~
makomk
The thing is, it was months between the Foundation launching the Pi and its
basic, advertised functionality becoming even close to reliable. Originally,
your SD card had to be carefully picked due to firmware bugs that made it
incompatible with most of the newer cards on the market, ditto for your USB
keyboard and mouse because it was incompatible with many of those too, and the
network fell over all the time as well.

In fact, despite the Pi Foundation trying to blame the problems on power-
hungry keyboards and people using the wrong power supplies and everything
except the Pi itself, an outsider eventually figured out that the USB hardware
and driver couldn't reliably talk to any low-speed USB devices like keyboards
and mice. Communicating with anything the Pi Foundation didn't explicitly
advertise, like webcams or Arduinos, was even more broken.

~~~
CrLf
Regardless of that (which I haven't experienced, at the very least because I
only got a Pi when they started selling the Rev 2), any platform has its
issues at first. The important part is that they recognize them and fix them.
People can choose not to buy if the outstanding issues are important to them,
but they seem to have chosen to buy en-masse instead...

Unless you are referring to those issues being, in part, from the non-open
nature of some parts of the Pi. If that's so, I only have to point to every
other platform where there's a ROM with non-open firmware. Being that on the
Pi all firmware is loaded on startup, and on other platforms the firmware is
there and all that the OS can do is work around it's bugs...

------
Create
Endless marketing for an obsolete surplus item (your last phone is likely to
be more capable). Just to clarify:

\- doesn't work without proprietary blobs, ie. you are NOT allowed to learn
how it works.

\- doesn't make use of the hardware w/o additional license crippleware

for the fans to clear the fog:

[http://whitequark.org/blog/2012/09/25/why-raspberry-pi-is-
un...](http://whitequark.org/blog/2012/09/25/why-raspberry-pi-is-unsuitable-
for-education/)

<http://boingboing.net/2010/09/19/intel-drm-a-crippled.html>

The VideoCore graphics processor on the Raspberry Pi in particular needs
drivers that do not comply with Fedora's licensing guidelines. Let alone DFSG.

Go with an openwrt friendly router instead (the audio noise and desktop
experience is substandard on the pi anyway)

~~~
jwr
Your critique is unfair and one-sided. As an example, I use the PI as an
ethernet/web bridge for my microcontroller projects. Your "openwrt friendly
router" won't necessarily have (documented!) GPIO pins I can access, a
3.3V-level UART, SPI or I2C.

With the Pi, it took me all of 5 minutes to hook up an MSP430-based device via
UART, and another 10 minutes to get a perl script that talks to it via the
(included) driver for the UART.

Anyone that tries to compare the Pi to the "android sticks out there" forgets
that there are people for whom time is important. I'd much rather start with a
popular, documented and well-supported (as in: downloadable distro image that
supports all of the hardware) device than hack my way through an undocumented
jungle of hardware/software. And I do know what I'm doing, I've written Linux
drivers before. I t's just not something I want to do every time I start a new
project.

I also think that in spite of the critique of the lack of openness, this is a
breakthrough project. Broadcom has been famously secretive and closed. Getting
anything from them without being a multi-million device maker and having an
NDA has been a nightmare. Now I hope Broadcom will notice that lifting the
veil a little brought in some money.

I found the Pi to be an excellent tool, I am thankful to its creators and I
wish them all the best.

~~~
jlgreco
Not to mention the "openwrt friendly router" replaces a "substandard" desktop
experience with a _non-existent_ desktop experience...

That's like saying _"the back of a Prius is a bit cramped for my kids as they
are growing up, so I replaced it with a motorcycle"_.

~~~
jwr
Well, perhaps, but I really don't understand why people buy Raspberry Pis and
try to use them as desktop machine. I mean, this thing doesn't even come with
a case, it is clearly not a desktop. It's a hacker's tool.

There is the second crowd that wants to use them as poor-man's video devices,
hooked up to TVs. That's fine, and I actually tried running Raspbmc on it. It
works. Kind of. Until it breaks. But it isn't your optimal, finely polished
and tuned media machine. And I really don't think there is much point in doing
it.

The Pi is a hacker's tool. It's great for learning, hobby electronics, various
interfacing needs, and lots of other things. But it isn't a notebook, it isn't
a desktop, and it isn't a media device.

~~~
jlgreco
As I see it, the value in a pi is that it is balanced. You can get cheaper
devices, you can get devices with more GPIO, you can get devices with lower
power consumption, and more powerful devices. The Pi sits in a sweet spot with
all of those factors though, things like usb-dongle computers and openwrt
friendly routers push all of those nobs one way or the other.

Also, maybe I'm weird but I have never liked xbmc regardless of the device; it
is just plain shitty. The pi that I'm using as my home server/media player
right now I just use with omxplayer. After years of just using mplayer that is
much more comfortable to me. Of course I also use my Roku primarily with
curl...

------
B-Con
I kind of get the impression that a lot of their sales went to the uber-geek
crowd that already spends lots of money on gadgetry (such as myself). I'm sure
it was still a learning tool for them, but whenever I see phrases like

> The Pi has been used as a tool to teach and learn programming

I can't help but think that the vast majority of buyers already knew a lot of
what they were doing. But... I could be wrong.

Regardless, it was a good product and had wild success. I'm glad they made it.

~~~
davidroberts
It's an incredibly fun plaything for geeky people like me, but also
educational. I'm learning Python, and I have mine always running and set up so
I can ssh to it anywhere from my cellphone. I fire up emacs through ssh and
work on my Python programs when I'm commuting by bus or train. I also have it
set up with CLISP and Scheme for when I want to mess around with those.

But the funnest thing is that I used samba to mount the music directory on my
desktop, so that I can ssh in and play music from my cellphone from anywhere
(it's connected to the speakers and TV in my living room). I also use it to
play videos from the video library on my desktop.

~~~
shrikant
In addition to the NFS mounts (instead of Samba -- no Windows at home!), I
took a slightly different route [1] and set up a DLNA server on it, so I can
play my media using the various phones and tablets around the house.

It works brilliantly well -- if you have a DLNA-compliant TV, you could use
that as well to stream media from what is basically a wireless media centre.

[1] [http://shr1k.github.com/post/2013/02/16/setting-up-a-
raspber...](http://shr1k.github.com/post/2013/02/16/setting-up-a-raspberry-pi-
powered-headless-media-server-and-nas/)

------
greggman
I'm not at all an expert in electronics but I'm still curious what makes a
Raspberry PI better than the $40 android USB sticks? Linux? Inputs? Is it just
a matter of positioning? Just curious.

~~~
graue
I've seen very mixed reviews of the Android USB sticks, especially at the low
end (~$40 as you say, many are more like $70)... they seem unreliable. They
also don't have quite the large community hacking on them that the RPi has.

Not an expert opinion, just the reason I went with the Pi personally.

Also, they run Linux by default, so you don't have to worry about installing
it and whether it's going to work.

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting negativity here, mostly disappointment at wanting something that
doesn't exist (an actual open source 3D subsystem), but some in performance
issues.

The 'all up' RPi is about $100 (less monitor) which is not a bad price for a
compact, self contained, programmable computer that is "mostly" open. Lest
people forget the original IBM PC and APPLE II were also 'closed' in many
ways.

So as a teaching tool, its pretty freakin' awesome. While I might have had
someone bring up a cast off PC before, now you can have them using their own
machine which is easy to carry in a back pack and transportable. Many folks,
even of limited means, have access to a TV set that has a spare HDMI or
composite video input. So basically it hits that target pretty well.

Given the sales volume there is some value to someone :-)

That said there are lots of things a simple, non-3D Linux box can do which are
really useful. So while its not a 'game console' (although I suspect it could
run MAME pretty nicely) its quite useful. And from a 'learn to program' /
'experiment with algorithms' point of view its pretty much lowest entry cost
out there (caveat the 'free' discarded PC) so what's not to like?

------
Zarathust
I bought a RP last Christmas to use as a xbmc station with my new TV. I've
been quite disappointed, the experience is sluggish, even when overclocked to
eleven. Since I bought so much crap with it (power adapter, wireless adapter,
power usb hub...), I'll try to recycle it into something else eventually but
really all I needed was a 10 feet hdmi cable to plug my computer in.

------
sordidfellow
The Raspberry Pi sounds great, but like many others I've been waiting for
weeks since my order with no feedback at all on when it might ship.

There's certainly a bias in the shipping thread, but you can find plenty of
folks having issues!

<http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=23>

~~~
tehwebguy
Out of curiosity where are you ordering from / having them shipped to?

This is probably the 5th time I've seen someone post something similar but all
of mine have arrived within a few days or weeks.

So far I've ordered from Newark/Element14 and MCM Electronics and I'm in the
US.

~~~
sordidfellow
I ordered from Allied, and I'm also in the US.

I'm tempted to cancel and place the order elsewhere...

~~~
maudineormsby
I placed my order, heard nothing for 4 months, then all of the sudden got a
shipping notice and it showed up two days later. All I know is they're
shipping them as fast as they get them.

If it's been a while, why not drop their customer service a note and ask for
an update? If you're polite I doubt they'll begrudge you that.

EDIT: Also ordered from Allied in the US (California)

------
guiomie
I have a rasberryPi, its in my closet, doing nothing. Am I the only one on
those 1 million sold doing nothing with it?

~~~
sordidfellow
It's something I'd like to tinker with.. I plan on using it as a frontend for
my media center with the raspBMC software.

<http://www.raspbmc.com/>

------
mtgx
Looking forward to an ARMv8 chip next year (based on Cortex A53 most likely,
and hopefully dual-core).

~~~
wmf
Isn't RPi based on ~2008 technology? If they keep to that philosophy they
won't have ARMv8 for a while. I'm sure ~$200 ARMv8 boards will be available
but they won't benefit from RPi hype.

------
weix
If they made more, they can sell more.

------
ck2
Want to sell another million in half the time?

Get netflix working on it.

(it's not a cpu problem, it's a linux problem)

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>it's a linux problem

Linux can play videos just fine. It's a coryright / DRM problem.

~~~
chimeracoder
Specifically, it's a Microsoft problem, since Microsoft refuses to license
Silverlight's DRM to Linux.

Also, Netflix CAN now run on Linux, as of ~4 months ago:
[http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/how-to-get-
netfl...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/how-to-get-netflix-
streaming-on-ubuntu-1210/40191)

~~~
jlgreco
I'd call it more a Netflix problem for either choosing silverlight in the
first place (or failing to obtain licenses for their media that permitted them
to use anything else). I don't know of anybody, _regardless_ of OS, that finds
the silverlight requirement pleasant.

~~~
chimeracoder
FWIW, Reed Hastings (the CEO of Netflix) was on the board of Microsoft until
November.

