The Telegraph reports that Raspberry Pi Trading has offloaded stakes to Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust in a move that values the operation at around $500m. Most manufacturing is able to be done in the UK, and last year's sales amounted to 7.1m units for a profit of £11.4m.
Lansdowne Partners' presence in the list of investors is less surprising than Ezrah Charitable Trust. The latter was founded by former Goldman Sachs vice-president and Farallon Capital Management partner David Cohen in 2016 to focus "on the poorest of the poor, especially in Africa" – an indicator that it may be the work of the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation that was of interest.
The Register mentions that the foundation's 2020 financials show an income of over £95.8m, up nearly double from the £49.5m it reported in 2019.
Raspberry Pi Trading makes the hardware, the magazines, the peripherals, and so on. The Raspberry Pi Foundation runs the charitable programs.
Previously:
(2021) Two New Microcontroller Boards Released with Built In Displays
(2021) Raspberry Pi Begins Selling its RP2040 Microcontroller for $1
(2020) Raspberry Pi 4 Gets 8 GB RAM Model, Also 64-bit OS and USB Boot (Both in Beta)
and more.
Related Stories
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new Raspberry Pi 4 model with 8 GB of RAM:
Now, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has upped the ante by releasing a Raspberry Pi 4 B with a generous 8GB of RAM. Launching today for $75, the Raspberry Pi 4 B (8GB) is identical to other Raspberry Pi 4 B models in every way, except for its RAM capacity. So what do you do with all that memory, and is spending $20 more than the price of the $55 4GB model worth it?
The short answer is that, right now, the 8GB capacity makes the most sense for users with very specialized needs: running data-intensive server loads or using virtual machines. As our tests show, it's pretty difficult to use more than 4GB of RAM on Raspberry Pi, even if you're a heavy multitasker.
A beta version of a 64-bit Raspbian OS, which is being renamed to "Raspberry Pi OS", is available. The existing 32-bit Raspbian can use all the RAM, but with a limit of up to 3 GB per process.
Some changes have been made to the board:
The back of the board adds silkscreen for certifications, as well as existing modifications for Raspberry Pi 4 Rev 1.2 to avoid damaging the board when inserting a MicroSD card. But the top of the board has more modification around the USB-C port, USB Type-A ports, and a chip between the VLI PCIe to USB chip and AV jack is just gone. So it's possible further USB-C issues have been fixed, and some improvements have been made to USB host ports maybe with regards to powering up external hard drives.
[Update from Eben Upton about hardware changes:
These are the regulator changes I mention in the post. The disappeared chip near the USB connector is the old regulator. The new stuff near the USB-C is the new regulator. The input clamp component has moved across to the USB area to make room.
Several iterations of the Raspberry Pi 4's firmware have reduced power consumption and heat. A beta-level firmware update from earlier in the week added USB boot support.
Raspberry Pi Announces RP2040 Chips For $1
Earlier this year the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico with RP2040 microcontroller for doing embedded development. Now that RP2040 chip is being sold for just $1 USD via their resellers for those wanting to build their own electronics with this Raspberry Pi silicon.
[...] The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced they have shipped over 600k Raspberry Pi Pico boards this year and orders for another 700k. More creators and other businesses meanwhile have been seeking to build out their own wares using the RP2040 chip, which has now led the group to offering the chip for $1 USD in single-unit sales. By this autumn they expect "serious volume" of the RP2040 chips for those looking to build out their own wares with this tasty silicon.
Raspberry Silicon update: RP2040 on sale now at $1
Also at CNX Software. Alasdair Allan says:
Today's announcement is for single unit quantity only. We're still figuring out what reel-scale pricing will look like in the autumn, but we expect it to be significantly lower than that.
Previously: Raspberry Pi Releases "Pico" Microcontroller at $4 Per Unit
Raspberry Pi Users Mortified as Microsoft Repository that Phones Home is Added to Pi OS
LOLIN S2 Pico – A compact ESP32-S2 board with an OLED display
LOLIN S2 Pico – A compact ESP32-S2 board with an OLED display
If you're into small MCU boards with an integrated display, you're in luck as LOLIN launched the S2 Pico board with ESP32-S2 and an OLED display about at the time same as LILYGO T-Display RP2040 board we covered yesterday.
Wemos/LOLIN S2 Pico board offers WiFi connectivity, a 128×32 OLED display, USB Type-C port for power and programming, as well as the usual GPIO headers in a compact 50×23 mm form factor.
$10 Raspberry Pi Pico Alternative Comes With LCD Screen
Tom's HARDWARE: $10 Raspberry Pi Pico Alternative Comes With LCD Screen
Microcontroller boards based on the RP2040 chipset, the same SoC that powers the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico are becoming very popular among makers. Newer boards are popping up with extra features appearing on them, such as this 1.14 inch color display, the $10 LILYGO T-Display spotted by CNX Software.
It's not the first such board, of course, with the Arducam Pico4ML pulling a similar trick - and with a resolution of 240×135 pixels it's hardly HD - but it comes in at just under $10 with the RP2040 board attached. Along with the ST7789V SPI controller needed to run the screen, you get all the usual Pico accoutrements such as the dual-core Cortex M0+ processor, 2 x UART , 2 x SPI and 2 x I2C connections, along with a generous 4MB of flash storage. Power and data connectivity is via USB-C, a good choice of connector as it is now becoming the norm on maker boards. Where the LILYGO T-Display falls short is the GPIO. The board looks to be wider and a different pin layout to the traditional Raspberry Pi Pico, so creative hacking is required to connect accessories designed for the Pico.
Sadly, a major drawback is that it cannot run Windows 11.
Raspberry Pi Launches New Website For Its Hardware
In a surprise move, Raspberry Pi today announced that a new website has been created to support Raspberry Pi devices, sales and documentation. This marks a change from a single website from 2011 which served both educational outreach and sales. Another change is Raspberry Pi's social media presence, with the original Raspberry Pi twitter account focusing on the hardware, and another representing the charity and educational outreach of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Raspberry Pi Trading and the Raspberry Pi Foundation have long been separate entities. Raspberry Pi Trading is responsible for the hardware engineering and sales of Raspberry Pi while Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity that provides educational outreach such as learning resources and teacher outreach program "Picademy".
In two blog posts, one written by Liz Upton, executive director of communications for Raspberry Pi Trading, and another from Philip Colligan chief executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we learn that the division is a necessary step as the user base grows and their requirements change. The new raspberrypi.com website aims to serve those interested in the Raspberry Pi hardware and software and provides documentation and links to resellers offering official Raspberry Pi boards and accessories.
Some posts from the RaspberryPi.org blog have been transferred to the RaspberryPi.com news page. The former blog focuses on the education mission while the news page has the project ideas, magazines, product announcements, and other news.
Raspberry Pi said yesterday it would be pushing to get its miniature computers into more shops across Africa, admitting that its presence on the continent was limited to a single approved reseller with commercial ops in a few countries in southern Africa.
Writing on the company blog, Ken Okolo said he had been recently appointed to focus on building a network of resellers and partnerships across industry and the education sector in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Cameroon, and Uganda.
Previously Raspberry Pi was available through a South African reseller with "some commercial operations" in nearby countries, but the rest of the continent was vastly underserved, relying on e-commerce sites like Amazon and [Alibaba], and their high shipping rates, to dispatch the product from other parts of the globe.
According to Okolo, this burden "undermines [the] goal of ensuring affordability and availability across the continent."
Previously: Raspberry Pi Attracts $45m After Lockdowns Fuel Demand for PCs
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday September 23 2021, @12:42AM (1 child)
So, the price is going up?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @06:35PM
Exactly. That type of behavior which we got to see a lot of during the start of the pandemic really shows the lie of capitalism. The promise of capitalism is that competition makes for more efficiency and thus better quality at lower prices. We see that the opposite is more frequently true, and lax regulation makes pseudo monopolies easy while doing nothing to prevent collusion.
The corruption has gotten so bad we have blatant insider trading and conflicts of interest from our elected officials yet no consequences. Which of course is the desired outcome, corruption so pervasive that people stop caring.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday September 23 2021, @01:05AM (10 children)
Someone using the Pi as some kind of full PC desktop replacement? Any tips or comments to share? Mostly thinking if one could put them in a nice little box for the parents and such.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Acabatag on Thursday September 23 2021, @02:23AM
The Raspberry Pi 400 is a nice choice to set somebody up with a desktop. It's all integrated into a keyboard. It's almost like a 21st century Commodore 64 or Amiga 500 or Atari ST. Just plug power and a monitor into the back and go.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @03:01AM
There's no shortage of different cases to put the Pi 4 in. Problem is, it's slow, with a weak GPU, lackluster video decoding, etc. If you value your loved ones, give them an x86 mini PC instead.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Booga1 on Thursday September 23 2021, @04:56AM (1 child)
What the Pi 400 really has going for it is convenience. All in one, pre-built, power supply, video cable, SD card, mouse. Simple, and done! The Pi 400 is great for people that will be sitting at a desk, but I personally prefer a full size keyboard.
A Raspberry Pi 4 with a wireless keyboard and mouse offers a little more flexibility that way as a home theater PC or traditional desktop. You can hide the Rpi4 behind the display and have fewer cables to worry about.
I also found the 4GB Rpi4 model was WAY more reliable than my older 1GB Rpi3 simply because heavy web pages didn't bog it down or crash the browser outright. However, it's got a major strike against it for desktop power users: ARM. Even with Linux the x86 world has more software support. Lots of stuff has no ARM support, or limited ARM support. Make sure you know what applications they will be using before attempting to switch over. If it's just web browsing, email, Discord/Slack/IM, music playing, video watching, etc... the Raspberry Pi should be enough for them. I gave a Rpi4 to a non-technical friend and he loved it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @10:20AM
The le9 patchset on github for the linux kernel makes a huge difference. It also can be backported to 4.4 and 4.9 with minimal changes (the 4.4 patch requires noodling out the old numa structures that got simplified/changed somewhere between 4.4 and 4.9, but backporting to 4.9 from the 4.14 patchset is basically just line number differences.)
Having said that: Mozilla is so bloated now that the browser will crash pretty often. You need to use a low memory window managed and not have more than 1-2 open tabs with firefox, and many heavily scripted websites will crash it out almost immediately anyways (I actually had problems on a 2gig chromebook type device getting firefox to run just 1 tab without crashing... finally had to drop the gnome desktop running on it by default (at about 1 gigabyte in weight on ubuntu) to a thin wm to get it running ok. I think xfce/lxde might be sufficiently lightweight, although I sipped DEs altogether for my test.
Having said that: less than 4 gigs of ram is just asking for trouble with any modern linux distro and definitely with a web browser. The crap and inefficiency we've allowed to build up is going to be the downfall of modern society if we don't get it under control soon.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday September 23 2021, @05:57AM (3 children)
Overall, they seem to have homed in on a niche and excel within that niche. So I'll also add praise for the Raspberry Pi 400. The main limitations it has are that there are 3 USB ports and 4GB of RAM. That is in contrast to 4 USB and up to 8GB RAM in the smaller model 4B. With 1Gb/s networking on the Raspberry Pi, it will not be the slowest node. The model 400 is light, compact, and comfortable. The 4B even smaller. Sound is not bad, via HDMI or external speakers, though there is Hi-Fi hardware which can be added easily and cheaply enough. On either the 4B or the 400, the programs tend to run quickly enough to be very pleasant when not involved with using the microSD card. Chromium and LibreOffice are there. Thunderbird and Firefox are available. You can even run Slackware, Devuan, or FreeBSD on them and new systems are easy enough to swap in because the whole OS is on the one microSD card.
Speaking of microSD, there are some caveats. The largest one is that on all models of Raspberry Pi the microSD card will be the slowest part. So anything that causes a lot of reading or, worse, writing will be noticeably slow. There also is not much space on a microSD card. So depending on their needs you might add a local NAS, your own file server somewhere else, or, if you care nothing for privacy, even some of those "cloud" services. Depending on where they are sitting, a 2m HDMI cable might be too long or too short. And in some situations a model 4B using a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard might be a more flexible choice than a 400 because the 4B can be hidden from sight but for a switched power cable. But when using Bluetooth, you'll have to have wired mouse around for at least the initial setup. Also not all of the ethnic keyboards are available as a model 400. Though if you absolutely need a localized keyboard that is otherwise available via Raspberry Pi, you can buy one separately and then swap the keyboard faces. The 400's keyboard apparently uses the same manufacturing as their line of keyboards and are thus interchangeable. They can be loosened easily and safely with a dull but thin knife.
If you do try one, please make a journal entry here or blog post elsewhere about it.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @06:14AM (1 child)
Note that the Pi 400 has no 3.5mm audio jack.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday September 23 2021, @02:27PM
That leaves USB, Bluetooth, and HDMI with the 400. USB speakers are hard to find last I checked. While I'm not sure about those overpriced "sound bar" devices, medium to low quality Bluetooth speakers are quite common enough.
With the 4B, there are peripherals which can provide very good quality sound over RCA jacks. The form factor of those is not appropriate for the 400 but is great for the 4B. However with HiFi sound you have the problem of finding audio data of appropriate quality. High-sample rate FLAC is available from quite a few sources, but will quickly fill up any microSD card. Thus the mention of NAS or filesharing above.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @07:12AM
Could have used a couple extra gigs of ram, if I had been not so cheap. But, hook up to the family viewscreen with the HDMI, Ethernet to the WifiRouter, plug in dongle for proprietary keyboard and mouse, and good to go. Web browser for most anything, including Disney+ streaming. There is a steam app, but, blah. Mostly, sticks to the side of my astrophotography rig with super velcro, and runs a wifi hotspot to a controlling lappy or tablet. 128 gig Micro SD card, so no lack of storage so far. But like I said, more RAM is always good, and budget you power, or the Raspberry will drop the wifi.
Oh, got the 4 with 2gigs of ram. Running astroberry for the most part.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Thursday September 23 2021, @02:43PM (1 child)
The Pi 400 is a great plug and play device. In the event that you don't want to fiddle with it much, it already comes with a 300mhz boost to it's CPU, otherwise, it's essentially a Raspberry Pi4 4GB in a keyboard.
Here's a very interesting option:
https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-m-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-4.html [argon40.com]
All you need is the case, a Pi4, a compatible m.2 drive and you'd have a nice mini desktop. The whole boot from a SD Card thing is interesting, but booting from a real drive would be ideal.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday September 24 2021, @12:16AM
The 1.5 GHz of the original Pi 4 should be considered an underclock now. When it was released, thermal performance was bad, and keeping it at 1.5 GHz stock was probably necessary to compensate. It had too be low enough to not throttle (much) in the official plastic case which is a much worse thermal situation than using a heatsink case or a fan. Power consumption and temperature was brought down significantly [raspberrypi.org] through a series of firmware updates [raspberrypi.org]. Now I have mine (8 GB) at 2.1 GHz in a FLIRC case and don't see it go much above 60°C.
The Pi 400 contains a giant metal backplate in contact with the CPU, so it's around as good as any other passive heatsink case (maybe worse than a metal case with a desk fan pointed at it). I think it has a newer revision of the SoC and fixes associated with the 8 GB Pi 4 model, which could also improve efficiency slightly.
Running from a microSD can slow things down but it isn't too bad, especially if you have a lot of RAM.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @01:44AM (8 children)
I remember when the Raspberry Pi was for giving impoverished teenage nerds their own computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @01:47AM (2 children)
Like what happened with the OLPC, the RPF ended up with moles from Microsoft on the board of directors.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Acabatag on Thursday September 23 2021, @02:28AM (1 child)
The Pi still doesn't run Windows for the most part. My eePC 4G has always just been an XP machine. Microsoft 'won' on that box.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday September 23 2021, @07:05AM
And this is why my Linux eeePC is in a box with its battery degrading and posing a fire hazard. Raspberry Pi is 64bit, now. And no Windows, which is a good thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @04:30AM
Raspi has always been less open and less performant. It astounds me that they are the leader of the pack in ARM SoCs. I still don't any, although I've somehow ended up with a bunch of Arduinos without ever spending money on one, and they are basically the embedded parallel to raspi.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Freeman on Thursday September 23 2021, @04:44PM (3 children)
They Raspberry Pi foundation still does that. The difference is that they can actually support the good work they do with money from people who like fancy toys.
The OLPC was a very cool and interesting project, but it didn't work. Oh, the hype-train was going full throttle, but it wasn't able to deliver on the dream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child [wikipedia.org]
Whereas, Raspberry Pi has delivered again and again. Still, it seems to be a much bigger thing in the UK, than here in the USA. Which makes a kind of sense as they are based in the UK and manufactured in the UK (mostly/as much as feasible).
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @09:07PM
OLPC was a very nice concept. In other hands, it might even have worked. The primary problem was Nicholas Negroponte, a serial conman. He got away with it for years because MIT Media Lab managed to attract enough genuinely bright people to occasionally strike gold, but Negroponte's specialty, his primary contribution the Media Lab endeavor, was being a hype-man. A hype-man without discretion is a conman, and we learned that Negroponte had no discretion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @09:16PM
I had a search for what "they were still doing", and it was buying up commercial computer magazines, with no mention of Computer Science programmes.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @12:16AM
> The OLPC project is critically reviewed in a 2019 MIT Press book titled The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child.[5]
Does the book address the fatal blow that the addition to the board of its opponents, Intel and Microsoft, caused it? The first thing they did when the two got representatives onto the OLPC board was to redo the specs so that it used the power-hungry, expensive Intel CPUs and bloated the rest of the spec up until it could run Windows -- badly. That pushed the price way over $100 per unit and the trade press had a ball with that failure, and needed little goading from their advertising partners, Intel and Microsoft, to keep mocking and tearing into OLPC.
Seriously, OLPC was doomed from the moment someone decided not to slap down the very bad idea of letting the projects most extreme opponents onto the board of directors.