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Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M

theinquirer.net

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Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M

#21

Post by ce4 »

sparaker wrote: post #7

I have always found banana pi to be superior in terms of value for money.

Maybe for your personal use case this is true.

However note these important things:

- Longterm support (former models still being sold)

- 100% backwards compatibility (RPi1/2)

- fully open source stack including GPU driver

Broadcom's VideoCoreIV driver has been open sourced by Broadcom making the RPi well suited for future developments like Mir and Wayland. In contrast, the Banana Pi has a Mali GPU without a proper open source driver (lima development seems currently halted).

ARM/Mali open source driver situation explained: http://libv.livejournal.com/26635.html

List of ARM GPUs and driver status: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphics_d...

Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M

#23

Post by bduerst »

zend3v wrote: post #22

Call me ignorant, but what is the point of this thing? Couldn't you just learn to program on a normal PC like most people have instead of buying something smaller, or are the potential uses for this thing really as limitless as I'm lead to believe?

You could, but a normal PC would run you more than $50, and would require driver overhead, bios setup, etc. and would probably be overkill for small projects.

The purpose of the Pi was to make an small, inexpensive educational board that "just works". The hardware standard makes it easy to flash other instances onto the Pi, and the form factor makes it easier to use with something you couldn't put a PC box next to.

Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M

#24

Post by bduerst »

joezydeco wrote: post #15
tdicola wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it really matter? I'm sure countless Apple II's, etc. were bought and barely used too.

Kind of does matter when we're comparing the relative success of the two devices. We know about the ecosystem that sprung up from the Apple ][ because we have history to look back upon. All the firms that sold software (I still miss Beagle Bros). All the magazines. All the books. All the accessories . I just don't see that same ecosystem surrounding the RPi, especially if 5 million users are involved. A couple of hea…

Different eras, different mediums.

I think the success is correlated in the markets that they are driving though. RPi wasn't the first microcomputing board (Arduino was introduced 2005) but it definitely popularized them. Now you have intel Edison and a bazillion other tiny computers springing up.

It's easy to be skeptical now but I think 10 years from now it will be easier to compare Apple IIe to RPi (good or bad).

Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M

#25

Post by rbanffy »

I find it quite lovely its CPU is a direct descendant of the one that powered the Acorn Archimedes, which, in turn, was inspired by the 6502 that powered the BBC Micro, the Apple II, the 8-bit Atari family, the PET, the VIC-20, the C-64 and so many others.

The Pi stands on the shoulders of a giant on top of a pyramid of giants.

Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M

#26

Post by sparaker »

ce4 wrote: post #21
sparaker wrote: post #7

I have always found banana pi to be superior in terms of value for money.

Maybe for your personal use case this is true. However note these important things: - Longterm support (former models still being sold) - 100% backwards compatibility (RPi1/2) - fully open source stack including GPU driver Broadcom's VideoCoreIV driver has been open sourced by Broadcom making the RPi well suited for future developments like Mir and Wayland. In contrast, the Banana Pi has a Mali GPU without a proper o…

Yes i was strictly speaking in terms of specs. You are right in this regards, rasberry pi has much better eco system.

Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M

#27

Post by zem »

1348791hef wrote: post #10
Digit-Al wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I own a couple of them and love them! And there's your answer as to how the Pi can surpass the Apple II. The Pi is so cheap that people can easily own two or three. Do you think many people owned more than one Apple II? :-)

My dad (an experimental physicist) still has ~10 of them in his lab. (They run the code that directly controls his apparatus -- it was written in the 80s, and with them being so plentiful in university surplus there was never a reason to change platforms. Plus, the code itself is some combination of assembly and BASIC, which would probably be kind of a pain to port!)

there's clearly a market for a raspberry pi running an apple ii emulator, then!

Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M

#28

Post by joezydeco »

bduerst wrote: post #24
joezydeco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of does matter when we're comparing the relative success of the two devices. We know about the ecosystem that sprung up from the Apple ][ because we have history to look back upon. All the firms that sold software (I still miss Beagle Bros). All the magazines. All the books. All the accessories . I just don't see that same ecosystem surrounding the RPi, especially if 5 million users are involved. A couple of hea…

Different eras, different mediums. I think the success is correlated in the markets that they are driving though. RPi wasn't the first microcomputing board (Arduino was introduced 2005) but it definitely popularized them. Now you have intel Edison and a bazillion other tiny computers springing up. It's easy to be skeptical now but I think 10 years from now it will be easier to compare Apple IIe to RPi (good or bad).

If the RPi creates a wave of kids enthralled with embedded systems and Linux system development, I'm certainly for it.

But, from my viewpoint as an embedded systems developer, I fear that those are greatly steeper learning curves than how the Apple generation (myself included) got started:

    ]10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD  ";
    ]20 GOTO 10
    ]RUN

Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M

#30

Post by stadeschuldt »

ZeroFries wrote: post #17

What are people commonly using these things for?

I have one RPi for logging temperatures in my apartment: http://pi.tafkas.net/temperatures/

And another one is monitoring solar panels on the roof of a house: http://solarpi.tafkas.net

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