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Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge

bbc.com

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Re: Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge

#61

Post by snazz »

fsloth wrote: post #54
danaos wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rpi foundation are in trouble. The current SoC is old, limited at 1GB maximum RAM, and the GPU core is dated from 2011, 8 years ago. In my opinion they should severe ties with Broadloom and open up to global competition.

There is inherent value in having a stable, battle tested platform. The fact that the same chip has been sold for general public for the last 8 years is to me rather appealing than a turn off. Given the complexity of the modern software stack, there have been a zillion bugs that have ruined someone elses day and have been hopefully fixed. Although, I have no idea of the support quality of the Pi foundation since I ha…

I agree with this sentiment, but I do think that the RPi Foundation is going to have a hard time improving from their current state without breaking backwards compatibility, because they made some decisions early on that no longer make much sense today.

The big ones, in my opinion, are the write-limited, slow SD card interface, the microUSB power connector, the 1GB maximum RAM, Ethernet that shares bandwidth with USB, and ever-increasing power requirements.

I think the Pi Foundation wants to churn out more new units by increasing the CPU speed, but with the super slow SD interface and the capped-out RAM, performance hasn’t made significant improvements in a long time.

I also think it was a bad decision to not focus on open-source software with the Pi. They have been including proprietary user space applications forever (Mathematica, for instance), the GPU boots a proprietary ThreadX operating system that has DMA and complete CPU control, and the thing requires lots of binary blobs to boot. The education aspect (particularly as a low-level programming platform) would have been made more accessible without such an opaque boot process.

Re: Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge

#62

Post by srcmap »

ekianjo wrote: post #55
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like an Apple Store light edition. Not really convinced the design and branding of the store matches up well with the realities of their actual product.

Yeah. Brand-wise, I would rather see the Raspberry Pi shop like a kind of bazaar where you find everything in all sorts of places rather than a very tidy and clean place where everything is in order. The "everything should look like what Apple does" is really tiring and generic these days.

They should have area for group meeting area to host regular meetup / learning tutorial sessions for hobbyist and students.

Also a lab/work bench where anyone can plug and play different components together and experiments, measure voltage, signals with an USB oscilloscopes (make with PI? ).

Volunteers can come in regularly to demo, share info, organizer classes.

Instead of just shelf full of the products - it should also have area where it run a lot of the interesting projects found on the web AI object recognition with YOLO2|3, PI self driving car, etc

Re: Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge

#63

Post by SmallDeadGuy »

entity345 wrote: post #13
leejo wrote: post #5

Makes sense - their offices are (were?) based in Cambridge just up the road from the city centre and about a 15min walk from the new shop. Little trivia: in my previous job I worked in the offices that would be taken over by Raspberry Pi a couple of years later :)

Yes, they are based in Cambridge and so is the main Broadcom office in the UK. And so is Arm...

Yeah I work in the office next to them, same floor same building. And previously worked for Arm. And I have a friend working at Qualcomm just down the road from me, too. Quite a small little world here :)

Re: Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge

#64

Post by SmallDeadGuy »

pdpi wrote: post #30
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that it's a university town with strong tech links, the general retail public in Cambridge is going to be quite different to the general retail public in most of the rest of the UK. I'm not convinced the idea makes sense financially, unless they're selling all of the extras and kit parts needed to make the Pi do something useful. If they are, then fine. If not this might look a little like a vanity move - not b…

In my understanding, the new reality here is that brick-and-mortar stores are increasingly becoming showrooms to support online sales, with brands closing smaller shops and focusing on big "experiential" flagship stores. The description somebody else gave here of the Pi shop as "more of an event space than a store" would tie in well with this strategy.

Yeah that's what I've noticed, too. In Cambridge we have a Tesla store in the main shopping centre, which is just a Model S and a Model X on display in a small room with some people that talk about it. I don't think they actually make any sales there, it's just for marketing purposes.

Re: Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge

#65

Post by tonylemesmer »

adav wrote: post #22

Perhaps this is in reaction to Maplin’s troubles? That would previously have been the only place I would have thought of to buy a Raspberry Pi on the high street.

It would be ace to be able to walk into a RPi shop and be able to purchase LEDs, resistors, OLED screens, ESP8266 modules, breadboards etc.

Maplin was a great shop and open on the weekends was often a lifesaver.

Re: Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge

#67

Post by maaaats »

srcmap wrote: post #62
ekianjo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Brand-wise, I would rather see the Raspberry Pi shop like a kind of bazaar where you find everything in all sorts of places rather than a very tidy and clean place where everything is in order. The "everything should look like what Apple does" is really tiring and generic these days.

They should have area for group meeting area to host regular meetup / learning tutorial sessions for hobbyist and students. Also a lab/work bench where anyone can plug and play different components together and experiments, measure voltage, signals with an USB oscilloscopes (make with PI? ). Volunteers can come in regularly to demo, share info, organizer classes. Instead of just shelf full of the products - it should…

Why should they? This is trying to reach new people, not cater to existing hackers in the same way. You could always just visit a hackerspace. Having this in a high street locations would be extremely expensive and waste of resources.

Re: Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge

#68

Post by benj111 »

wc_cs wrote: post #60
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like an Apple Store light edition. Not really convinced the design and branding of the store matches up well with the realities of their actual product.

I believe they're trying to market to the general public. If Apple stores are good at turning heads from how they are designed, then it makes sense to apply that design to their own store. It's about getting people inside.

I see what you're saying, but don't you then run the risk of people not understanding what they're buying. It's ok selling it like an iphone, but if people are expecting an iphone, they're going to be disappointed.

Apple branding, stores and USP all kind of complement each other in that minimalist 'just works' feel. Raspi isn't that.

Re: Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge

#69

Post by bsder »

dcbadacd wrote: post #51
bsder wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not entirely correct. It seems like the issue is current spikes, and those can occur under far more conditions (HDMI, external USB devices, etc.). I suspect that beefing up the power system filtering would reduce the power supply maximum current requirements quite dramatically.

What I meant is that I'm annoyed by the lack of compatibility with standards that could provide the required amount of power to a rPi, the current microUSB implementation is awful and shouldn't be repeated.

Ah. My comment was more along the lines of "If they redid the power system with better filtering, they could make it work with 5V, 500mA and operate on standard USB." However, Broadcom won't give us plebians access to the documentation, perhaps I'm being too optimistic, and this really is the best they can do.

The Beaglebone Black guys seem to work inside a 5V 500mA envelope quite well. At the very least, they don't seem to have anywhere near the issues that the RPi folks seem to.

Re: Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge

#70

Post by chrisseaton »

bloak wrote: post #47
chrisseaton wrote: post #16

When did the British start calling shops ‘stores’?

In both standard written and colloquial British English it's almost always "shop", but the term "store" is normal in the jargon used by people in the retail business. It's quite common to hear the word "store" used in a public announcement in a shop, for example. There are many things like that. For example, normal people say "tin", in my experience, but the signs in a shop seem to use "can" more often than "tin", bi…

Purchase vs buy, beverage vs drink. Not sure what the point in these slightly more technical sounding words that people seem to like to use.
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