> It's really doubtful that more than a tiny fraction of RPi sales have gone to kids. Be honest here, whatever the RPi Foundation's marketing, the overwhelming majority have gone to hobbyists.
That's great, the hard work put in by hobbyists has made the Pi an even better platform to teach the kids. And their purchases have helped financially support the educational mission. I say this as a hobbyist who started out picking up a Pi and has now directly taught kids.
> The RPi is uniquely unsuited to an educational environment anyway.
A traditional educational environment, maybe, but it's exactly those environments that have made computing such a dry and uninteresting pursuit in the first place. The computer lab at my school and college was tragic. I can only imagine how much I'd have loved to hack on a Pi, and I'm glad to be a small part of the effort to make that opportunity available to present and future generations.
> The SD cards are unreliable
I've used Pi's non-stop since day 1, and it's been a large part of my career for over 3 years. I can count the number of SD card failures I've had on one hand. I've never been particularly careful about shutting them down. I have two running on my desk 24/7 for development/testing. We've have two running in our post room, hard powered on/off every single day for 2 years. I think reports of unreliability are greatly exaggerated.
> the cheapo phone adapters
There's an official Pi power-supply for that. I certainly wont argue that terrible phone adapters are a problem though. It was the answer to every problem report on IRC for years :D
> You can't PXE boot them
The Pi 3 can PXE boot and boot without SD cards from, albeit not all, hard disks and other USB-attached storage.
> The Pi should have had eMMC day one
I think the cost of this wouldn't have helped with traction.
> shipped with a proper power adapter
Yup! Albeit, cost again. And, arguably, there are pretty good reasons not to ship a microUSB power adaptor, since most of us already have a tangled mess of them anyway from a dozen past phones. It's just unfortunate the phone ones were/are awful.
> The Pi still needs a case
It doesn't need one, but they look pretty :D Incidentally it's because someone recognised the demand for a case that I have a job that I love. Oh and people love to accessorize, so the ability for a customer to choose one to their liking is often a positive part of the experience.
> a monitor
Most people had an HDMI TV, but in retrospect the inclusion of HDMI/RCA led to a whole aftermarket of HDMI->VGA adaptors since schools are stuck in 1998. I think it's important to reinforce that learning doesn't, and absolutely shouldn't, only happen in schools.
> a proper system architecture with SATA and often USB 3.0 and gigabit ethernet
To hobbyists, maybe, but then they'd have cost $100 and been another unsung bit-player like the BeagleBone Black (Disclaimer: I loved the BBB). The Pi's biggest success was shaking up market, perhaps even creating one, and gravitating a whole bunch of people to a common cause. They also proved there was a market, so now if you want those things, there are plenty of alternative choices! And then they did it again with the Pi Zero- blatantly giving the market an "we're not going to watch you hit $9, $8, $7, $6 price points just for headlines. Get to the point" shakeup. You don't have to buy a Zero, but you'd be on rocky ground if you tried to argue that your options aren't better because of it.
> Furthermore - the Pi was plagued by driver problems with its USB stack for years
Ugh. shudder memories! But largely irrelevant these days.
> it totally fails as a machine for teaching programming compared to Ye Olde White Box.
Having run several workshops using the Pi, and contributed to more, I disagree. If for nothing else other than it's different enough to not simply put people off from the get-go. "Learn programming on these boring old white boxes" is not nearly as exciting as "learn to interface the real world with minecraft on credit-card sized computer." The low cost and educational push has also enticed a wave of enthusiastic geeks out of the woodwork, eager to teach anyone who'll listen. I know and deeply respect many of them, and I've had tremendous opportunity to make a positive impact on people's lives that perhaps I wouldn't have ever realised without the Pi.
> I tried to run a pair of RPis as my fileservers for about a year and a half
Yup. They are totally awful for this purpose, or at least just barely adequate, but that doesn't reinforce that they're awful at everything else.
> running an educational PC lab
I think you perhaps have too narrow a definition of education. I think the Pi excels because it fascinates people outside of a sterile classroom environment. Nobody is going to build and battle a robot, or create a 20 square foot version of whack-a-mole, or make a power-glove controlled robot arm, or a "disco" button that explodes their living room into song and light... out of a bunch of computers PXE-booting and tethered to ethernet.
The effort put into Blobless linux is itself a fantastic example of people using the Pi to push their own boundaries and learn things. And you say it's failed at being educational? Nonsense.
@christina_b - thank you!