The Raspberry Pi Foundation today announced a milestone 10 million units sold.
The low-cost, credit card-sized, single-board computers first launched in early 2012, in hopes of inspiring more people to study computer science at Cambridge.
“By putting cheap, programmable computers in the hands of the right young people, we hoped that we might revive some of the sense of excitement about computing that we had back in the 1980s with our Sinclair Spectrums, BBC Micros, and Commodore 64s,” Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton wrote in a blog post.
At the time, however, Upton & Co. anticipated lifetime sales of about 10,000 units—”if we were lucky.”
“There was…certainly no expectation that four years later we would be manufacturing tens of thousands of units a day…and exporting Raspberry Pi all over the world,” Upton said.
To celebrate the occasion, the Foundation—notorious for selling only the bare-bones board sans accessories—is, for the first time, offering its own bundle. The Raspberry Pi Starter Kit features a 3 Model B, 8GB NOOBS SD card, a case, 2.5A multi-region power supply, HDMI cable, optical mouse and keyboard, and a copy of Adventures in Raspberry Pi Foundation Edition.
Initially available online in the UK (from partners element14 and RS Components), the £99 ($132) collection will roll out to the rest of the world over the coming weeks.
“Thanks to you, we’ve beaten our wildest dreams by three orders of magnitude, and we’re only just getting started,” the blog post said. “Every time you buy a Raspberry Pi, you help fund both our ongoing engineering work, and our educational outreach programs,” including Code Club and Picademy.
