3.8 Million Raspberry Pi Linux Computers Sold – Oh My!

From the ‘Little Computer that Could’ files:

I own three Raspberry Pi’s (two B’s and one B+) and many people I know also own one or more Pis. All those Pi add up and now the Raspberry Pi Foundation says that it has sold 3.8 million units.

That’s a whole lot of Pi.

The Raspberry Pi was never supposed to be a massive volume seller. It was supposed to be a teaching and educational tool to help get kids (and adults) interested in development and maker culture.

A year ago at LinuxCon NewOrleans, Raspberry Pi Founder Eben Upton said that 1.7 million units had been sold. That means that in only a year, another 2 million units were sold.

By any estimation, the Raspberry Pi has been a stunning success.

There are no shortage of projects that a Raspberry Pi can enable. From the ever-popular media server (RaspBMC and OpenElec), to security (Onion Pi) and even as an air quality monitoring system (Air Pi).

What the Raspberry Pi has proven is that if you make low-cost, yet powerful, computing accessible, people will use it for all manner of wonderful things. The low-cost hardware of course is the key enabler, but it’s important to remember that so too is the ARM silicon and the open-source operating systems (Linux!) that run on that silicon.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist