Raspberry Pi leans into semiconductors as sales climb – especially in US and China Raspberry Pi has reported impressive revenue and profit growth, but its hobbyist origins risk taking a backseat amid soaring semiconductor shipments. The firm, famous for its eponymous diminutive computers, recorded [PDF] revenues of $323.5 million in FY 2025, an increase of 25 percent on 2024. Gross profit was $77.8 million, …
> hobbyist origins
They disappeared once there were shareholders to placate.
Even though most of the value of RPi as a product and a business is built on a foundation of "hobbyist" development and advocating. Without that it would be just another Chinese board with precious little software., and fewer features than most.
The entire PC market was built on what generally gets termed hobbyist use. The reality, I think, was wider than this. I was far from the only one to realise that here was an opportunity to introduce computing into situations where the price of a mini would have been impossible*. In fact another lab was using a PET in the same application area where I was using an S100-Z80 system in the late 70s Education was another area and this was something Pis were aimed at right from the start. "Enthusiast" would be a more general, hence better, word.
Once the possibility of wider sales was visible shareholders were able to finance development and production so that value for money and real prices fell. If that hadn't been the case the power that you can have on your desk on your lap, in your pocket and even on your wrist would have been prohibitively expensive for most of us. That's the real world with all computing, including the Pi.
* As a private individual the price of the micro-kit would have also been impossible for a Hobby.
About 70% of SBCs go to industry so that leaves about 30% going to makers, hobbyists and education. That 70% means the prices stay low for those other categories. Don't forget everybody pays the same price for Raspberry Pis, industry commercial, hobbyists etc. and there are no discounts for industrial customers or quantity buyers. So to say that the hobbyist is being left behind is not true, they benefit massively from the large economies of scale that having large numbers of industrial users gives Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry has already succeeded in spawning a bunch of clones, many of which stuck to the original principles better than the Pi. I worry a bit they might get shafted by component allocation as AI demand devours memory and chip production, but the hobbyist ethos and component ecosystem is here to stay.
The Pi was already getting a bit pricey for a lot of use cases. They haven't had a game-changing idea in a while.
Just adding more RAM is an evolution, not a revolution.
> The Pi was already getting a bit pricey for a lot of use cases
Do you mean that you are finding equivalents, with full support, at lower cost - or are you just looking at the prices of the top-end R'Pi models - and are those the ones that are correctly sized for your use-cases?
> Just adding more RAM is an evolution, not a revolution
Does anybody *want* a revolution? That would tend to risk the whole "it can still do everything it always could, but now also..." aspect.
> Do you mean that you are finding equivalents, with full support, at lower cost - or are you just looking at the prices of the top-end R'Pi models - and are those the ones that are correctly sized for your use-cases?
Not sure what "full support" means. If a user wants a cheap SBC for desktop use, Pi is a great product and where they should start looking. Comparatively, there's cheaper competition which is also spec'ed differently.
Non-comparatively: many of us are still hoping that volume and targeted specing brings prices down and allows Linux-based SBCs to take up more utility functions. Lower costs bolster the downstream ecosystem and give us real options against the flood of proprietary, ad-enabled, data-harvesting IoT devices.
> Does anybody *want* a revolution? That would tend to risk the whole "it can still do everything it always could, but now also..." aspect.
Yeah, we do. Raspberry's vision already sparked one major paradigm shift. What they did was really cool and expanded what we can do with computers. They launched countless careers and startups by giving the curious more room to tinker. Why wouldn't we want to see another?
If I knew what the next big thing was then I'd be building it. Until then, I hope someone does.
> Not sure what "full support" means
More than one OS release before it is orphaned! Well, for "full" OS releases for the foreseeable future, backed up by a history of supplying same - without orphaning the older SBCs as soon as the next model comes along. Official recognition of multiple OSes. Recognising the existence of and encouraging third-party add-ons. Supporting user forums, teaching materials (with the Foundation and the manufacturing sides working together).
> cheap SBC for desktop use, Pi is a great product ... many of us are still hoping that volume and targeted specing brings prices down and allows Linux-based SBCs to take up more utility functions
The various models of R'Pi aren't providing Linux-based SBCs to do utility functions? You mean, like all the utility functions that are discussed in forums (including The Register comments), the MagPi magazine etc?
Such as sitting in the heads of biped robots, alongside motor driver boards; in wheeled robots, running ROS; providing IP cameras with local storage and a bit of processing (motion triggering), for wildlife or security; to run BirdNET Pi and alert when interesting things happen in the garden; running DNS filtering and ad-blocking with Pi-Hole; running a NAS; running a PVR for Freeview telly using the official TV tuner HAT; displaying fun plasma patterns on an LED HAT; playing radio streams from the Internet; playing (badly) synth tunes with Sonic Pi and a touch keyboard HAT (Pimoroni have had some great HATs iver the years and I'm a sucker for a gadget). Those are just the things done, so far, with R'Pis in Corner Mansions: haven't (yet) got around to plugging in an SDR and joining the UK meteor-watch group, or building a cabinet for playing retro video games, or monitoring and graphing the heat distribution in the wife's composting bin (that is one I've promised her).
Thinking about it, aside from checking acquired kit is working, I don't recall *ever* using an R'Pi as a desktop PC. Shame, 'cos I got a monitor with a HDMI lead all ready to plug in, and I even have an official touchscreen in a nice case.
> Raspberry's vision already sparked one major paradigm shift.
A "paradigm shift" that went all the way back to the UK in the 1980s when we could get home microcomputers that were accessible (from the p.o.v. of the bits&bobs, not the price!), could be easily programmed by youngsters, had interesting I/O and lots of published, shared, projects on how to do fun things with them.
The biggest change that R'Pi did was going back to "the kids can gave a computer" with, to help lessen the anxiety and allow more than just the middle-class swotty kids to have one, an OS on SD (so you can screw up and not worry - our '80s boxes had to make do with ROMs!) and a *starting* price that doesn't break the bank. This was all discussed in the years & demos that led up to the R'Pi 1 being released.
> They launched countless careers and startups by giving the curious more room to tinker.
As they planned to, precisely as the '80s boxes did for that generation - R'Pi brought back what had been lost.
I would like people to try for a revolution if it could be achieved, and so should you because it doesn't mean the old thing ceases to exist. If they invented a new form of computer the way they can get a significant chunk of the credit for the low-cost SBC, but that new form wasn't useful to you, you could still use the SBC.
To be more specific, something I want might count as a revolution or just evolution in another direction: I'd like an SBC that can run off a battery productively. Pis have been evolving in the direction of a lot more power consumption, and even the first ones consumed lots of power. Back when people were trying to put a Pi in a laptop, it would get two hours of battery life on a battery that could run a low-end Intel processor for eight, and a laptop is far from the most constraining environment for batteries. I think portability would be a useful addition to this area, but the point is that any innovation, whether in that direction or any other, has the chance to be very useful to a lot of people and reproducing Raspberry Pi's success when they invented something quite new.
> something I want might count as a revolution ... I'd like an SBC that can run off a battery productively.
Well, it all depends what you mean by "productively" - and why you are discounting so many extant 'phones and laptops as SBCs! 8Especially the less-repairable units, which definitely had it all on one circuit board, as you found out when a socket got bent!)
We've had Palm Pilots and the Psions - they waned in the face of the smartphone - which you could program yourself. The trouble is, the current crop of smartphones are far, far more of a pain to program yourself than the older devices; perhaps what you are looking for is a "back to the '90s" in the same vein that R'Pi took us back to the '80s?!
If you can "make do" with an SBC that doesn't have gigabytes of RAM (though they can have loads of SD storage) there are battery-powered SBCs all over the place, for a variety of prices (more if you willing to make the box yourself). For ready-made, have a look at M5Stack Cardputer or Tab 5. The Picocalc has a better keyboard, or try their DevTerm with a bigger Pi inside. Maybe look at a HackRF and tweak that (expensive way of doing it, if you don't want any of the SDR stuff, but - what do you want your SBC to be able to do?)
If you had more of an idea of what you mean by "an SBC (run of a battery)" and, most importantly, what "productively" is supposed to mean, why it is different to using a smartphone, then we can explore more of the devices that are (have been recently) available - or identify the gap in the market!
Good ideas, and I'll clarify what I'd like. You can currently power the Pi from a battery, but its power consumption is much higher in all possible states than anything of the same capacity for computation. A phone tends to have a much faster processor, on which it runs a lot more software, and connected to more active peripherals and also runs on less current. That's partially due to optimization in software, partially the use of chips intended for mobile devices rather than chips for mains-powered boxes, and a few smaller factors. That makes sense for SBCs where they intended them to be used as desktops or servers, so a cheap chip from a TV box would do that fine.
I would try to just run the software on a phone except the software limitations make it harder to do many things with one; even a rooted Android device takes a lot of hacking to get anywhere close to the openness or configurability of an SBC. I already know that a device I can program with similar power to a Pi which can fit, battery and all, in my pocket is possible, and I can envision plenty of ways to use that power and portability. Now I'd like to buy that, but am only offered subsets of that in the hardware people sell. Since I couldn't buy it, I tried to build it, but all the SBCs around which I could try were Pi-like in power consumption. That meant either a much larger battery or much more frequent runs to recharge it.
This is possibly a somewhat minority interest. I've seen a few attempts and tried a couple myself, almost all built around the Pi itself or the compute modules, and all of them alluring but nonetheless limited by the same lack of power management. You can obtain something with long battery life if it uses a microcontroller, but of course that comes with limitations on what can run in that lower level of resources. I'm sure others have different revolutionary concepts, some of which would open other opportunities if they could be achieved. It strikes me that there was almost no revolution in the hardware of a Raspberry Pi SBC - the chips were common and used all over the place and the software wasn't new - except that they actually made, sold, and supported it to great effect when others didn't bother. That's kind of what I want here in a slightly different area.
"I already know that a device I can program with similar power to a Pi which can fit, battery and all, in my pocket is possible,... Now I'd like to buy that, but am only offered subsets of that in the hardware people sell."
I take it you mean "a device I can program with similar power to a Pi" but go on to say that what you can buy is only a subset of "that", by which I think you mean a Pi. In which case perhaps it's the difference between the subset and the complete thing which makes the complete thing draw more power That and all the optimisation that's gone into the phone and is spread out over an orders of magnitude bigger market.
Not quite. The available subsets I can buy are:
A phone: computing power is great, power consumption is great, software is somewhere between bad (unrestricted Android) and very bad (Android if I can't unlock the bootloader).
Raspberry Pi (also includes everyone else's SBCs): Computing power is pretty good, software is great, power consumption is bad.
Microcontroller-based devices: Power consumption is great, computing power is very limited, software support is adequate (E.G. it took Raspberry Pi years to get Bluetooth working on the RP2040, whereas on a normal Pi, I can use plenty of Bluetooth stacks if I need that).
I have things I'd like to do where a phone-sized device with phone-style battery life would be useful, but the only devices I can get that meet both of those are phones whose software is nothing like the convenience or quality of that of the Raspberry Pi. So far, I don't have a solution to this want, but if someone did build it, I'd like to buy it.
I've tried quite a few Pi like boards, I've even reviewed some for magazines and distributor websites.
They're generally OK, but not a lot cheaper than a real Pi and almost all fail awfully at support, some of them have *never* had software updates after the initial release, to all intents and purposes they're abandoned. (Looking at you Radxa).
Raspberry Pi still support boards from 2012 (though support is likely to end in 2030) which is just unbelievable for such an old, cheap board.
> The Pi was already getting a bit pricey for a lot of use cases
Quite. It's mainly attraction, USP even, was that it cost $35 and gave you a "computer" to experiment with and develop code on.
As it is, for people who only want a media player then a s/h mini PC is cheaper and comes with all the extras (power supply, case) that are needed. For those who want to build simple household devices the ESP32 covers the requirements for $5 instead of $100. As does a pi zero 2 or its many clones.
The Pi was revolutionary 14 years ago and spawned a revolution. But like many revolutions, it has lost impetus and direction.
And amazingly, 14 years later they still sell a Pi that you can experiment and code on for $35. It’s far more capable and powerful than the one 14 years ago. 4 x the cores, 4 x the RAM added WiFi added Bluetooth and years of optimisation hardware and software.
Not only that, they also sell one which is more powerful than the original for $15.
And there’s a micro controller board you can experiment on and code for. $5.
Yeah, they’re getting a bit pricey these days. For the hard of thinkIng.
It's also amazing how many people seeking to defend the Raspberry Pi don't notice that the person you're accusing of just looking at the flagship knew and mentioned the existence of the other models in their own post: "For those who want to build simple household devices the ESP32 covers the requirements for $5 instead of $100. As does a pi zero 2 or its many clones."
That doesn't make them right. I don't entirely know what they think Raspberry Pi should do or have done to avoid the "lost impetus and direction" they're complaining about. Your response to them, though, argues they're not looking at things they did and is therefore incorrect.
It is totally correct. Those whinger people are suggesting that Pi is forgetting its original price/value proposition. When in fact they have increased value and effectively reduced price by maintaining a 2012 level. And they are actually making huge efforts to do that as the cost of keeping the 1GB Pi at $35 is probably subsidy by the more expensive ones.
It is not totally correct. James accuses Pete of "just look[ing] at the flagship products and think that's the only product Raspberry Pi make", when Pete's comment makes it clear that they know what other products Raspberry Pi make. Therefore, James is incorrect about what Pete thinks the products are, whether or not we agree with Pete's other opinions (my initial thinking is no, but there's not much clarification of why Pete believes what he does so I don't even know that much).
That doesn't make them right. I don't entirely know what they think Raspberry Pi should do or have done to avoid the "lost impetus and direction" they're complaining about. Your response to them, though, argues they're not looking at things they did and is therefore incorrect.
So RPi have lost impetus and direction? Nobody expects an ESP32 to change the world, why should a Pico or Zero?
In these parts are buying (and using!) way more RP2xxx microcontrollers (on breakouts and boards from a variety of vendors) than we are R'Pi SBCs. Especially if you discount the SBCs that were bought second-hand.
And we benefit from the support that R'Pi put into the tools for the MCU, just as we do the software that runs on the SBCs.
I already have an Aspire One netbook. For limited tasks it's still really useful because it's self-contained and I can hold it in one hand while typing with the other.
I did recently configure an old RPi as a GPS NTP time source, now used as my network's primary time sync. Great use for the older RPis, along with being media players (they run Squeezeplay/Squeezelite nicely). Even one of the second-ever production batch (I was slightly too late for the first) is still doing duty in that form.
As for professional use, I've noticed quite a few in various labs at work, and I remember putting together a wobbulator with one at a previous place.
That's cool. I don't have one, so I had to use the numbers from the review, but just to check, is that 7-8 figure your guess or measurement, because the review's number was measurement so I consider it far more useful than an anecdote.
Even if it is correct, presumably from better power management in newer software, it is still not the kind of impressive low-power operation the original comment was hoping for. A normal laptop can run for longer on the same size of battery, and modern ARM laptops with processors optimized for it can significantly exceed that. The Raspberry Pi's hardware and software were not designed for battery operation and it shows. I've used and made battery-powered devices out of Raspberry Pis from the first model B to the CM4, and one thing they all have in common is that you need a lot more battery for them to work than a comparison to other computing devices would suggest.
Of course it’s measured. How else would I know?
I can use it for 3 hours across 2 sessions plus more than an hour for the third. First thing I tested.
There is no power save mode available , it just runs.
Compared to my work Dell laptop which is 4 hours or so despite power management.
Both are good enough as I don’t have any portable purpose where I need to use it for more than a couple of hours.
Of course Pi isn’t designed for portable applications, but it really isn’t relevant. If you are spending time away from power sources then you aren’t looking at an enthusiast device anyway.
"Of course it’s measured. How else would I know?" Estimation, which is what both your comments suggest with the "seems to be". I get about ten hours off my laptop battery, judged from when I generally have to plug it in again and assuming I've correctly estimated how long each use session was and added them correctly, but if I wanted to actually measure it, it would take recording those start and stop times precisely and likely documenting what I was running on them, the way that the reviewer did in order to precisely report a 5H 59M runtime which I rounded to 6. There's no chance they miscalculated that, whereas if I guess I used the laptop for about two hours but it was actually 83 minutes because I overestimated, my anecdotal value could be off. That's the difference.
"Of course Pi isn’t designed for portable applications, but it really isn’t relevant."
That depends what you want to do with it. It's not relevant for what Raspberry Pi intended people to do with their first SBCs and they still mostly build new ones for the same general types of uses, which is why they built it that way. So from their perspective, it is indeed not relevant. If you choose to use it off a battery, it remains relevant to you because you're trying to accomplish something else and will have a harder challenge doing so. Pointing out that the Raspberry Pi was intended for another purpose so wasn't built with that in mind is one thing. Arguing that enthusiasts can't spend much time away from wall power is weird and pointless.
This discussion talks a lot about RPi as a computer, the standard RPi 3,4 and 5 etc. These are very useful but I think the real action for Raspberry Pi in the future isn't these boards, the ones that started out life using up obsolete Broadcomm cable box processors, but the RP2040 and RP2050 devices used in the Pico. These are actually really powerful embedded processors with arguably a leading price / performance mix, a serious contender for any new design. From a designer's perspective they're powerful, twin core processors with an interesting peripheral mix (once you get to grips with their PIO it can substitute for numerous specialized peripherals) with a genuine low power mode. Add to this an extensive and readily accessible software development ecosystem through the Nano and you've got quite a product.
To me, a microcontroller is a device with internal memory and designed to be low power consumption and small footprint. So I wouldn't expect DDRx support, because that adds volume and power to the mix. If you really want DDR then you're moving up in the world to larger chips with more pins and a bigger power budget, not something that powers the low-level tech that doesn't need lots of RAM and may be battery powered and expect to last a long time. Who needs DDR support for a fridge controller, or a central heating controller,or a microwave? There is a huge market for "last decade tech".
I've been playing with Compute Module 5s for a little pro bono project. It just needes an ethernet connection and an MVMe SSD. The standard Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 IO Board works OK, and is cheap (AU$27) but the SSD connect was fiddly, and has lots of stuff that I didn't need.
I have set up a couple of Rapid Analysis Xerxes for Raspberry Pi motherboards. For my application they work really well and can be mounted in carriers for 10" MiniRacks. No business relation, just a happy customer...
It is possible to run a sophisticated soft-synth plus full audio and MIDI chains from a Pi4 at a sample rate of 48kHz and 64 frames. A pi5 will bump that up to 96kHz / 32 frames.
That is not a 'toy'.
P.S.
I know those figures are accurate as I'm on the team and we frequently test the limits (along with some experienced musicians).
... and I know this isn't an R-Pi "problem", but on "The Pi Hut" web site today, Easter Monday 2026:-
Pi4B 4Gb RAM - £96
Pi4B 8Gb RAM - £158.40
Pi 5 4Gb RAM - £105.60
Pi 5 8Gb RAM - £168
Pi 5 16Gb RAM - £292.80
I bought a Pi 5 16Gb from them on April 1st last year and paid £137.88 for the Pi 5 and £13,63 for an Aluminium Armor Heatsink case for it.
So the price of the Pi5 16Gb has gone up by 112% since this time last year.
I'm not suggesting that either the foundation or ThePiHut are scalping... but I do think that what is happening with RAM and storage prices at the moment are going to combine with the growing oil crisis and cause untold damage to businesses and the world economy.
