Raspberry Pi Sales Cross 5 Million Mark

The superb Raspberry Pi continues to create ripples in the micro-computing world. It’s horizon of success continues to expand seamlessly with the company announcing that it has just passed the five million sales mark from the first iteration of its inexpensive machine. That too, just three years after it was first launched in 2012.

The company had originally expected to sell around 10,000 units only. Built originally with the purpose to enable students to code and learnt the internals of a computer, ever since its inception the Raspberry Pi has taken over the world like a storm and has captured the interests of millions of Hackers and Do-It-Yourself computing enthusiasts as well.

What makes the figure more remarkable is the fact that the credit-card sized device only passed the two million units sold mark by the end of November 2013, the 3 million mark by the summer of 2014 and over 4m by the end of 2014. More impressively, the foundation estimates it has already sold half-a-million units of the Raspberry Pi 2 model, launched just weeks ago.

Just confirmed the big news we’ve all been waiting for: we’ve now sold more than 5 million Raspberry Pis.

— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) February 17, 2015

“We’re amazed. We were thinking of selling 10,000 of these when we first started. We sold 500-times as many as we were ever going to sell. It’s brilliant news. We think it puts us second behind Alan Sugar for the largest amount of computers sold by a British company. The good thing about it is lots are going into the hands of children which is the mission,” said Eben Upton, the founder of the organization.

The Foundation also recently launched a fully fledged sequel: the Raspberry Pi 2, which is around 6x faster and has double the memory but retains the $35 price-point. Thus, it comes forth as no surprise that Microsoft is keen to make sure Windows reaches the people Pi will be reaching, announcing it intends to offer Windows 10 to Pi devs for free.

The Raspberry Pi is definitely one of the success stories of the decade and one of the best thing about it is that all the profits go straight back into their educational mission and into R&D: enabling them to train teachers for free, provide free educational resources, undertake educational outreach, fund open source projects and what not.

We think that this means that in just under 3 years, we’ve gone from zero to being the biggest selling UK computer manufacturer ever. Yowza.

— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) February 17, 2015