do you know where can I buy a 35$ PI 2 in the US? All places I've tried they are ~50$
MCM Electronics and Newark are authorized US distributors: http://www.mcmelectronics.com http://newark.com
Both are divisions of Premier Farnell.
Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M
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Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M
#12Earlier 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!)
Please post photos and a write up of this.
Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M
#13Wow I was curious and it looks like there were only ever about 5-6 million Apple II computers produced (according to Wikipedia). That's pretty darn amazing that the Pi is already on track to surpass the Apple II--what I remember as the most ubiquitous and well loved computer for learning when I grew up in the 80's. I think it's officially time for anyone who doubted the Pi to eat crow. I know I jumped on the bandwago…
I remain skeptical that all 5 million units are in daily use. A healthy fraction are probably in serious use by skilled embedded developers and a certain range of users like XBMC fans. Another serious fraction are probably using them for the actual educational purposes of the system. But I fear that the majority are sitting in desk drawers, booted once and tried and then left to gather dust. I compare them to treadmi…
Does it really matter? I'm sure countless Apple II's, etc. were bought and barely used too.
Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M
#14Wow I was curious and it looks like there were only ever about 5-6 million Apple II computers produced (according to Wikipedia). That's pretty darn amazing that the Pi is already on track to surpass the Apple II--what I remember as the most ubiquitous and well loved computer for learning when I grew up in the 80's. I think it's officially time for anyone who doubted the Pi to eat crow. I know I jumped on the bandwago…
I remain skeptical that all 5 million units are in daily use. A healthy fraction are probably in serious use by skilled embedded developers and a certain range of users like XBMC fans. Another serious fraction are probably using them for the actual educational purposes of the system. But I fear that the majority are sitting in desk drawers, booted once and tried and then left to gather dust. I compare them to treadmi…
You've been downvoted pretty heavily, but I think you're right. Both of mine are sitting in a drawer.
The fanless server I have under my desk has the equivalent storage, processing power, and bandwidth of dozens of Raspberry Pis. Any software I can put on my Pi, I can even more easily put on my server (which is also more reliable than a Pi, in my experience).
Pis running Linux also aren't nearly realtime enough to use for a lot of low-level embedded tasks, so I still use bare-metal AVR or ARM hardware for most hardware projects.
Mostly due to the lack of SATA and gigabit ethernet, the Pi is just really not that useful for me.
Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remain skeptical that all 5 million units are in daily use. A healthy fraction are probably in serious use by skilled embedded developers and a certain range of users like XBMC fans. Another serious fraction are probably using them for the actual educational purposes of the system. But I fear that the majority are sitting in desk drawers, booted once and tried and then left to gather dust. I compare them to treadmi…
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 heavily trafficked forums don't really seem like the same thing.
And given the Apple ]['s price ($1,200 in 1978 dollars or $4,700 in today's money), they were probably not as quickly tossed aside once interest waned. This was a serious a purchase as a used car.
Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M
#16Wow I was curious and it looks like there were only ever about 5-6 million Apple II computers produced (according to Wikipedia). That's pretty darn amazing that the Pi is already on track to surpass the Apple II--what I remember as the most ubiquitous and well loved computer for learning when I grew up in the 80's. I think it's officially time for anyone who doubted the Pi to eat crow. I know I jumped on the bandwago…
At least 12 million Commodore 64s were sold, some sources say higher.
Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M
#17What are people commonly using these things for?
Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M
#18The Brits had always a good feeling for 'personal computers' (Sinclair, Amstrad, Acorn)
Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M
#19I own an original Raspberry Pi model B (still running 24/7 in a project) for which I was on the pre-order from one of the first few batches (I think I just missed out on the first 10,000 or so), I eventually purchased an upgraded model B with 512MB ram and then I instantly purchased the Pi 2.
Very useful things, and the progress made is wonderful.
Re: Raspberry Pi becomes best-selling UK computer ever as sales top 5M
#20What are people commonly using these things for?
I'm using a couple right now to demo using IBM Watson services in real world (physical/IoT) applications - you can expect a blog post on that in a few weeks. (I work on the Watson team at IBM)
I also have one set up as an XBMC media center for streaming netflix and such.