One Million Raspberry Pis Sold

In Field of Dreams, farmer Ray Kinsella heard a voice that said, "If you build it, he will come." The Raspberry Pi Foundation must have heard a similar whisper about building a low-cost PC, and like Kinsella, the company was wise to listen, having likely sold a million Raspberry Pi boards to date.

"The folks at element 14/Premier Farnell announced today that they alone have now made and sold more than half a million Raspberry Pis. They’re only one of two official distributors; we don’t have completely up-to-date figures from RS Components yet, but Farnell’s news suggests that we’re well on the way to having sold our millionth Raspberry Pi," the Raspberry Pi Foundation stated in a blog post.


That's an impressive figure this early in the game, and it's proof that there's a market for these kinds of devices. To help put it into perspective, the Raspberry Pi Foundation points out that half a million Raspberry Pi PCs stacked up on top of each other would be taller than the Empire State Building...111 times.

You could lay all those Raspberry Pis on the ground and they would extend as far as 5,070 double decker buses, or stack them end-to-end and watch as they reach higher than Felix Baumgartner's world record skydive of 128,000 feet.

No matter how you stack them, half a million Raspberry Pis translates into $17.5 million, and if you factor in the number of units sold by both distributors, the remarkable Raspberry Pi has probably netted close to $35 million.

If you're unfamiliar, there are two versions of the Raspberry Pi: Model A for $25 and Model B for $35. Model A just recently went into full production, while Model B has been available for awhile now. Both versions sport a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU, 3.5mm jack, HDMI output, and SD card slot. Model B boasts 512MB of memory, two USB ports, and a 10/100 Ethernet port, whereas Model A has 256MB of memory, a single USB port, and no Ethernet connectivity.