Raspberry Pi Has Dished Out Over 30 Million Units Since 2012

If you’ve spent any significant amount of time tinkering with electronics, there’s a good chance you’ve head of the Raspberry Pi. As it turns out, despite only being introduced to the market in 2012, over 30 million units have been sold to date, and for good reason.

Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton tweeted on December 14 that they have sold their 30 millionth unit, which was estimated to have happened on December 12. 

"Raspberry Pi numbers get stale fast. We sold our thirty-millionth unit some time last week (we think Tuesday)," he said. 

The Raspberry Pi comes in a multitude of variants, but the general gist of the device is that it’s a cheap creator board that can run a full operating system. They’re tiny at about the size of a credit card that’s been stretched into the third dimension with its connectivity ports that can be used for attaching monitors, keyboards, mice and much more. 

The latest edition, the Raspberry Pi 4 (pictured above), comes with enough hardware to act as a full desktop PC, though it's pricier than many other models, starting at $35 for a 1GB variant. Specced with 4GB of RAM, the price gets pushed up to $55. That being said, considering that it comes with a quad-core, 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72 CPU running at a clock speed of 1.5 GHz, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0, dual-monitor support and more, it's a bargain.

The main goal of Raspberry Pi upon its creation was for use in educational institutions as a learning platform and in developing countries to bring cheap access to computers, but the device also proved popular among other groups such as makers and people interested in home automation and robotics.