14 DAY TRIAL // The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced that they have sold 3.8 million Raspberry Pi mini PCs and the demand for this small device seems to increase every day.
It might not sound like much, but 3.8 million Raspberry Pi devices into the wild is actually a lot. In fact, it's more than many other hardware makers ever manage to produce, and that is testament of its quality. If you look at it as a whole, it's not a very impressive mini PC and you wouldn't even give it a second thought, but its strengths are derived from the huge support it has in the open source community.
In fact, Raspberry Pi has numerous Linux distributions that can be used with it, applications like XBMC make the support for this device a priority, there are all sorts of other hardware add-ons built for it, it's possible to connect it to a swath of other devices, and it's extremely user-friendly.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation doesn't really make a profit from it
One of the reasons Raspberry Pi mini PCs are so popular is the fact that its makers from the Foundation are not in it for the money. The entire project stated from a very simple idea, namely to provide kids with a simple, efficient, and cheap platform to help them learn more about programming. The scope of the project grew in size tremendously, and the developers continued to improve the device, while maintaining the same price.
"The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. It's capable of doing everything you'd expect a desktop computer to do, from browsing the internet and playing high-definition video, to making spreadsheets, word-processing, and playing games."
"What's more, the Raspberry Pi has the ability to interact with the outside world, and has been used in a wide array of digital maker projects, from music machines and parent detectors to weather stations and tweeting birdhouses with infra-red cameras," reads the official website of the Foundation.
Raspberry Pi Model B+ features an ARM processor with a clock speed of 700 MHz (Broadcom BCM2835 SoC full HD multimedia applications processor) and has 512 MB of RAM, 4 USB ports, an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, and a Composite Video port. Basically, all you need to make it run like a PC. Now, The Raspberry Pi Foundation has 3.8 million of these "bad boys" out there and they are all running Linux.
@ruskin147 As of today, it looks like 3.8 million - that's an *awful lot of computers*.
— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) October 11, 2014