Over 5m Raspberry Pis have been sold since its inception in 2012, making it the best selling British computer ever, according to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The cheap, credit-card sized computer sold 2m units by the end of November 2013, 3m by the summer of 2014 and over 4m by the end of 2014.
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
Demand for the basic computer was first driven by hobbyists, but is now bought by educational institutions across the world and the industrial sector, in which the Raspberry Pi has been used to power various machines and control systems.
The original Raspberry Pi went through three iterations, adding more memory and shrinking the size of the board. The Foundation launched a follow up, the Raspberry Pi 2, which is six times as fast as the first version this year, hoping to create a more capable general purpose computer for the same sub-$35 cost.
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
Rivals to the best selling British computer of all time include the 5m-selling Sinclair ZX Spectrum from the 80s and the BBC Micro, which sold only 1.5m units and was discontinued in 1994.
The Raspberry Pi looks set to eclipse records set in the 1980s, with demand for both the new Pi 2 and the original remaining strong three years on.
