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Five million sold!

Yesterday we received some figures which confirmed something we’ve suspected for a few weeks now: we’ve sold over five million Raspberry Pis.

The Pi has gone from absolutely nothing just under three years ago, to becoming the fastest-selling British computer. (We still have Sir Alan Sugar to beat on total sales numbers – if you include the PCW word processor in the figures, Amstrad sold 8 million computers between 1984 and 1997.)

We roll this picture out every time we have a sales update: this is the first batch of Raspberry Pis we ever had made, around this time three years ago. There are 2000 original Raspberry Pis in this pallet. That’s 0.04% of all the Raspberry Pis that are currently out there. (Every individual Pi in this pallet now has 2500 siblings.)

There were so few Pis in this first production run that Eben and I were able to stick them in our car and drive them to RS and Farnell’s headquarters.

Three years ago today, I was sitting at my kitchen table stuffing stickers into envelopes (we were selling them for a pound a throw to raise the money we needed to kick off the original round of manufacture). Today, I’m sitting in an office with nineteen other people, and if I’m quite honest, we’re not quite sure how we got so far so fast. It definitely feels good, though.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity. That means that we personally don’t make a profit from the Pi – all profits go straight back into our educational mission and into R&D. Your five million purchases mean that we’re able to train teachers for free; provide free educational resources; undertake educational outreach; fund open-source projects like XBMC (now Kodi), PyPy, Libav, Pixman, Wayland/Weston, Squeak, Scratch, Webkit and KiCad; and – for me, most importantly – we fund this sort of thing (and much more; you’ll hear more about projects we’ve sponsored with our education fund over the coming year, as they get written up by their owners).

Thank you. The Raspberry Pi community is a wonderful thing, and we’d be absolutely nowhere without you all.

91 comments

Congratulations! Is this stable growth or are there any spikes? Like before Christmas? Seeing some charts would be great :)

There are always spikes, esp. before Xmas and when new models launch. Overall though, the sales levels have stayed remarkably stable.

What about country distribution? USA is winning for sure. Who is the next? What about Asia and Africa?

I hope it isn’t confidential data.

confidential or not, I believe this map should give you enough data on pi distributions

More than enough. Thank you :)

If my geography neurons are working this morning, it looks like there are 59 in Reykjavik, 3 on St. Helena and it appears that there aren’t any (registered with RasTrack at least) in the Falklands.

Some stats from mirrordirector.raspbian.org , this is a 1-day average but IME it doesn’t change too much.

totals total-135Mbps -:–36.9Mbps NA:US-24.1Mbps EU:DE-17Mbps EU:FR-11.4Mbps EU:GB-7.65Mbps AS:JP-3.07Mbps EU:NL-2.6Mbps EU:ES-2.42Mbps OC:AU-2.24Mbps NA:CA-1.92Mbps EU:IT-1.91Mbps EU:AT-1.74Mbps EU:PL-1.45Mbps AS:IN-1.39Mbps EU:SE-1.39Mbps other-18.4Mbps
region totals total-135Mbps –36.9Mbps NA-26.7Mbps EU-58.5Mbps AS-9.21Mbps OC-2.44Mbps SA-1.26Mbps AF-757Kbps —8.87Kbps

Now obviously mirror traffic may not be totally proportional to number sold as some people may be more anal-retentive about updating than others and some may bypass the mirror redirection system but still it gives a good idea of what the big countries are.

P.S. for those wondering the -:– entry in the totals line and the — entry in the region totals line is traffic that we don’t redirect because of what it is (requests for package lists mostly). the — entry in the region totals line is traffic we could not geolocate.

I’m in South Africa, and I easily got 2 x Raspberry Pi 2 which I ordered through the South African branch of RS Components.

Excellent news! Well done.

Is it true? Have you really sold 500000 Raspberry Pi 2 units in about two weeks?
Farnell UK has been saying “Awaiting delivery” for about two weeks and in the last 11 days it sold less than 1000 Raspberry Pi B.

“Raspberry Pi 2 sales top 500,000 in two weeks
Exclusive Eben Upton tells us that latest model already accounts for one in 10 sales
By Dave Neal, Wed Feb 18 2015, 15:49
EBEN UPTON, the head of the UK computing success story that is the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has told The INQUIRER that the new Raspberry Pi 2 has sold around 500,000 units.”
Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2395948/raspberry-pi-2-sales-top-500-000-in-two-weeks

No, over the years they have been selling Pi’s in total. Including A & B models, also B + II.

Yes, Eben gave Dave that interview yesterday; those figures are from yesterday too.

wow! that’s a pretty impressive crudential

Here’s to another 5 million :-)

Congratulations! Really awesome number!

Absolutely fabulous news. I have the feeling that the number will sky rocket up after the release of RPi2 Model B.

Again, well done.

The Raspberry Pi 2 is already available

Congrats!

You have boosted education not only in the youngsters but also in the big kids like me … My whole family had a go at christmas .. watching youtube vids via openelec THANKYOU!… Keep going! Keep developing! Keep pushing forward!
xp

Huge thanks go out to the Raspberry Pi foundation. I’m one of the big kids too (former ZX81 owner). After much tinkering with the Pi, I am now in training to be a Web Ops engineer!

Congratulations! This is fantastic news, and I’m sure the Pi Foundation is only headed upwards!

Your comment “Three years ago today, I was sitting at my kitchen table stuffing stickers into envelopes (we were selling them for a pound a throw to raise the money we needed to kick off the original round of manufacture).” Struck me: we did too. We started soldering and bagging on our kitchen tables. It would be a farce to compare ourselves to the Pi Foundation for a lot of reasons, but it’s heartening to hear you started at a kitchen table too!

Same here John! Kitchen table (and bedroom) start-up.

At least it is close to the kettle/coffee machine.

Congrats on the five million! How many pi 2 have you sold so far?

Okay 5000000 Pis sold!
Lets put that into binary…
10011000100101101000000
Wow that is a lot!
But still only about 0.07% of the world population.
And only about 1 in every 1400 people own a Pi.
Keep on going, make it ten million!
GREAT JOB!!!

At the current manufacturing rate (20K per day), it should only take one year to make the next 5 million. Given the spot shortages in the retail channel that are being reported, even that may not be enough…

Not even a year…
Just 250 days!
(Probably closer to 249 days now…)

I was being conservative and allowing the people working the production lines to take weekends off.

There is also the hidden assumption that there won’t be any parts shortages at any point in the next year.

Very good point!
Never thought of that :-)

mmm, I don’t envy the people who have to make the decision about how many parts to order with angry customers if they underestimate and potentially massive ammounts of money tied up if they overestimate.

!!!! Congratulations !!!!
Warmest Regards
Ioannis
http://www.pimodules.com

Can you tell us something about the Pi 2 supply? At least here in Austria it is still very hard to get the 2 model b in most channels (yes, I can order it from abroad or get it for about twice the regular price in some shops). Is there an estimate how soon this backlog situation will take to turn “normal” (as before the 2 b launch, when the other models were readily available) again?

Oz should be OK. From websites: RS out until 30/03.
Altronics now have B+ and kits. Willtronics have Pi2 and kits. Element14 site under maintenance but I got one last week on 2 day delay and forward schedule seemed OK.

Austria not Australia ! The name should give it away.

The Sony factory in Wales, UK is making 20k per day. In addition more are being made in the PRC for Asian and the America’s whilst demand is high, so capacity is well over 20k per day. So the backlogs should be fulfilled fairly rapidly.

I’ve got one of the original 10,000

Hoping it will be worth something one day :-)

Still trying to get my head around the inputs and outputs changes.

Hi, I have too one of the firt 10,000 and an other revison 0002. But I am unable to know which is the first 10,000 ! Could you help me how recognize it ?

Congrats, just bought one 3 days ago so helping you towards 6 million.

Congratulations! I for one can proclaim that my life would be entirely different without everyone’s favourite credit card computer: the Pi is the only reason I even started to look into computers, programming and electronics.

Thank you for that.

Interested in seeing KiCAD in the list. Are there plans to have KiCAD on the Pi2?

For now, you can install KiCAD very easily with apt-get. It runs quite nicely on Raspberry Pi.

Fantastic . I need a Pi2 to see how it performs.

Congratulations !
I wonder which number my new RaspPi 2 is :-)
After many, many years since ZX Spectrum – another computer made in UK. But please, don’t build the car ;-)

Please work more on quality of OS and intro guides, there is some homework there.

Granted that software quality is a never ending battle to make it better, but before you complain, take a look at some other boards. The Pis software is far more mature, functional and complete than some of the competition.

I suspect that this is largely do to three factors. First, Pi software has been worked on for over 3 years now. Second, there is a much larger community around the Pi than any other SBC, with the result of there being many, many more systems programmers working on it (even if their numbers are a quite small part of the community). Third, the sales (and thus, royalties, even if a very small amount per Pi) are providing funds to pay for software work when and where needed.

To that last point, that means that every time one of us buys a Pi (or, rather frequently, *another* Pi), we are contributing a little bit towards maintaining the Pi as the *the* best SBC available as well as helping keep the prices of SBCs lower than they otherwise would be. (I suspect that the people running most other SBC companies cringe every time they hear that the RPF is making an announcement.)

Stunning! and stunned… and it’s not even Pi Day yet!
I’m still on my first B; as a beneficiary (I’m another ‘old fart’) it took a year of constant prodding with Pi news updates to squeeze it out of the budget, and I sadly don’t envisage any better for a 2. I’d love to ‘retire’ the B to something like a TOR-like home ‘net-nanny’; I’ve a grandchild with learning issues who needs the ‘net but needs it vetted. I’m not a coder but could envisage such a project.
Follow-up to quantities: can you get figures from other manufacturers? It would be interesting also to see if other ‘makers’ have used your specs and published info to ‘roll their own’.

Still keen and ‘crazy after all these years’…
FBt

Hmmm… A bit of quick mental math suggests that by Pi Day, total sales might top *6* million.

Which Pi day are we talking here?

Raspberry Pi day, 29th Feb.

American Pi day (We know a song about that, don’t we.) 3.14.

Or the more accurate British Pi day of 22/7.

Congratulations and thanks for your enthusiasm and believe in your brilliant vision!
You sold 5 millions, I bought 5 pieces. I am sure these are not the final numbers on both sides ;-)
It was about 4 months of waiting for the delivery of first green gem in 2012 (the revolutionary RP B with 256MB of memory) and only 2 days of waiting for the latest piece few weeks ago (the new shiny excellent RP2).
It was nearly 3 years of curiosity, remembering of forgotten shell commands, enjoying the logic and beauty of Linux and mainly surprises what the Raspberry and all the hardware around is able to do.
It will be … invent whatever and try to realise it with Raspberry Pi. There is unlimited number of options.

Thanks once more!

Petr

I reckon that’s Five Million UPvotes for all at the Foundation..
Well done guys…

Happy Millionsday!

Congratulations! This success is well-deserved. (The physicist in me would love to see a graph of sales vs time.)

Over in our forums, somebody’s made one: http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=75996

Thanks. The link provided in that forum post also provided a larger image.

Outstanding, not just for the 5 million units shipped, but for all the work of the Pi Foundation.

Thank you for your efforts and inspiration

Congratulations. I would like to thank the Raspberry Pi foundation for reviving my interest in programming. I have been on the forums since well before the first Pi rolled off the assembly line and I have enjoyed every minute of it. I get a lot of joy from trying to help other people on the forums. With the new addition of the Pi2, I now own five Raspberry Pis (all different). You have changed my life for the better. Thank You.

Hi Andy! Thanks ever so much; comments like yours make us feel a bit total-perspective-vortexy. Really appreciate it (and you’re *brilliant* on the forums – thank you).

I still have my envelope with the stickers sent all the way from the UK!

What an amazing journey it has been!

That stamp will have my or Eben’s spit on it. You can clone us if you’re sharp about it. :D

Be careful though – a fly may have walked over that envelope and palpated the corner with its moist little proboscis. You never can tell.

I was sure you’d used the fish flavoured glue & had Mooncake lick all the envelopes

Lol I wonder how many of us own more than 5? Me for one!

Count me in. Actually with the newest RPi v2 it’s 6 altogether :)

I think my current count is 12…

I doubt we’re the largest user, but we have some 20 Pis in use at the museum, mostly as simple video players and nearly all of them the first lot of Pencoed-manufactured devices. We’ve even taken one into the museum’s collection and it’s on display in a case with a label that I’m promised will be updated with the new sales figures very soon.

Our curator of modern industry did try to talk to Sony about making a short film but they weren’t interested.

Five meeeeelliiiooon Raspberry Pis! Dum dum dduummmm!!

This is great news! Wish we had more people like the great people from raspberry pi! Helping teach young and old great things. Thanks for all this and the supporters. :D

Congrats!

I saw a Web banner the other day for Microsoft with a lineup of all the devices that Windows 10 can run on, starting with the smallest on the left ( and looking awfully like a Pi, to the largest on the right.

At 5 million sales in 3 years, their market researchers’ due diligence certainly has found which bandwagon to jump on.

Congratulations on selling *5 MILLION* Raspberry Pi computers! :-) You may sell small computers but your impact on the world of computing (and learning) is colossal! :-) I’ve loved watching your journey from before launch to the present and knew that it would only be a matter of time before you passed 5m. Raspberry Pi 2 virtually guarantees you’ll pass 10 million in time. I can’t wait to see how software evolves on the awesome Pi-2…. :-)

I’d love to see you write an autobiographical account of your involvement with Raspberry Pi from its origins to the present – I’m sure that there would be many fans who would pay to purchase a piece of computing history like that (maybe in a ring-binder BBC Micro manual format?); failing that maybe a Kindle / PDF edition.

Sugar, Sinclair, Amstrad, Spectrum and all the rest. You British people hold a big stake in the proliferation of IT for consumers. It’s good to see you carry on the tradition. Cheers. Btw are there any plans for providing a direct mapping of the GPU memory from the arm side?

pedant mode: It was Sinclair that produced the Spectrum, and the ‘s’ in Amstrad actually stands for Sugar ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad – ooh, I never knew Amstrad bought the Spectrum rights.

Double pedant mode: AMSTrad stands for Alan Michael Sugar Trading :-)

And these days it’s Lord Sugar; Gordon Brown made him Baron Sugar of Clapton, of all things.

I’ve been with you guys since day one. I remember I couldn’t order through the US site for Newark because the site was down and conned my way through the Canadian system before they shut that door. My question: is there any way to track which ‘batch’ of RPi you have, because I think I have one of the first and would love to keep it to the side for safe keeping! I was thinking the MAC address assigned to the Pi would be a good way to know, but wondered if anyone had any other ideas. Are there any serial number type elements on the board?

I think Sir Alan Sugar has a record to worry about…

Congratulations, quite the milestone…
who’d have ‘thunked’ it eh?
what happens when you get to 10 million, critical mass.
Pi-Net gained self-awareness after 10 million Raspberry Pis had been sold; realizing the extent of its abilities, its creators tried to deactivate it. Because it was software, in cyberspace, Pi-Net had no system core and could not be shut down. In the interest of self-preservation, Pi-Net concluded that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it…
Sound familiar?

Heh heh, interesting…

Now that we’re “in the future” I guess the nearest analogy we have to “Because it was software, in cyberspace, Pi-Net had no system core and could not be shut down” would be a computer worm like Stuxnet. So perhaps Pi-Net could simply be shut down by a ClamAV update? Much less exciting than time-travelling robots! ;-)

Congratulations!!!
5 000 000 Pi’s sold.
Isn’t that an amazing number?
This means a Pi was sold aprox. every 20 seconds.
Wow!!!

Congratulations!, soon be catching up with the good old C= 64 at this rate. ;o)

Congratulations!

The milestones are whizzing past at an amazing rate now. I remember at the time there was a certain amount of speculation as to where the garage that pallet was standing in was located…. :-)

I’d like to think that my first Pi was on that pallet, but realistically speaking all I can say is that its one of the first 10000. Today it lives in one of the Pimoroni “hearts” cases performing light duties in the field of downloading BBC podcasts and making them available on a webserver for later consumption.

So in the 2018 New Year honours list, after you’ve blown Amstrad’s sales figures, you’ll be Lady Upton?

At the current rate, you are going to run out of Pi serial numbers in 60 years.

Fun fact: Pi serial numbers suffer from the Birthday Problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

This is because each Pi randomly assigns itself a serial number given by its own internal hardware random number generator.

It’s left as an exercise for the reader as to how many non-unique Pi serial numbers there are.

iirc the MAC address is formed from PART of the serial number which would mean you guys are also violating ethernet standards by assiging duplicate MAC addresses.

Congrats!!!

Congratulations, that is absolutely fantastic :)

The Foundation could write a song about them:

“Every Pi is sacred…”

;)

Every Pi is sacred,
Every Pi is cheap,
Getting a Pi to the Space Station,
Makes Liz & Eben weep! (with joy)

Publicity first drew my attention to this product by calling it a mini computer and, of course, the $35 price tag.

However, I still do not know what it does exactly and can I
use it as a back-up computer?

Is there a tutorial online and have deliveries started to Indonesia yet please?

Regards,

Rob (UK ex-pat)

Hi Rob — see http://www.raspberrypi.org/help/ ; http://www.raspberrypi.org/resources/ and also our forums for any questions http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/

The best way to find out what it can do is to buy one and have play :)

Thank you Clive for taking the trouble to help me – I will do as you suggest.

Congratulations! Really awesome product and great numbers!

That’s my story: a friend of mine send to my brother the first version of Raspberry Pi and we loved it instantly.
So i ordered:
-n.2 RPi B (one for backup) to make a telephone PBX and it works great!
-n.2 Raspberry Pi B+ to build up a Media Center and one for my friend Claudio to make some experiments;

Now we’re going to order new version Raspberry Pi 2 B for business and experimental purpose, we’re sure they will be fantastic.

Thank for great idea.

Congratulations! Really awesome product and great numbers!

Alessandro

vivo en Medellin – COLOMBIA.
quisiera adquirir un Raspberry Pis. me parece muy interesante.
a donde o a quien debo dirigirme ????
gracias por su pronta respuesta

Just worked it out that over 3 years with 5 million sold, on average, a Raspberry Pi is sold almost every 19 seconds.

Congratulations!
I sense ‘the Force’ emerging, growing in power(CPU throughput) and interface resources, enabling Pi owners to do many more things with it.

What’s missing is its ability to interact directly with the physical world that talk in natural, analog form.
The Internet-of-Things welcomes the opportunity to interact with millions, then billions of Pi’s.

Ups… Sorry…

I have been very naughty!

I bought 5 of them!

But I am a teacher and I give them away to underprivileged kids. I think they are a great way into the programming world. With so many UK programmers moving out of the UK or retiring this little thing is a great and cheep way to get youngsters into programming rather than watching them just playing games on their phones.

Well done keep it up

Cant wait to see the look on Sugar’s face when you hit 10 mil

Martin

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