The popular Raspberry Pi mini computing device has proved to be very popular in its own right and has shown up in a diverse range of interesting technological projects. Now we have some new figures that show the RasPi has (probably) achieved platinum sales figures (if it were an album or single in the US charts).
The way that the Raspberry Pi foundation has worked out that the RasPi has reached sales of 1,000,000 units is a little bit iffy, but they decided to open a bottle of champagne anyway, who can argue with that. Official RasPi distributors, element14/Premier Farnell, announced late last week that it had sold half a million units. “They’re only one of two official distributors; we don’t have completely up-to-date figures from RS Components yet, but Farnell’s news suggests that we’re well on the way to having sold our millionth Raspberry Pi,” reasoned the writer on the RasPi blog.
Infographic from element14, click to enlarge
element14 has put together an interesting and fun infographic comparing the amount of RasPis that it has sold with other well known metrics. For instance the half a million RasPis sold stacked end to end “would be taller than 111 Empire State Buildings” and would weigh the same as 200,893 iPhone 5 smartphones. Geeky comments suggest that this is only an eighth of the weight of an adult blue whale. However you can double all these figures if you follow The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s statistical logic.
In the last few months the Raspberry Pi has been enhanced with a free upgrade for new buyers, it now ships with 512MB of RAM as standard and it got its own app store, the Pi Store, during December to help new owners get started with software and development. I’ve seen more and more budget priced computing (and gaming) competitors for connecting to your HDMI equipped TV or monitor but the RasPi maintains its lead on price/utility for now.
