Raspberry Pi IPO: are they selling out?

30 thoughts on “Raspberry Pi IPO: are they selling out?”

• I really hope nobody writes this exact comment.

• Yep. Raspberry Pi is selling out. I would suggest Odroid or Pine.

• As a life-long ARM user, through ARM1 copro on BBC Bs ARM2 and 3 on workstation. RISCpc and, for the last 4 years, Linux /arm64 developer on Pis, I can say with some regret and a Great Deal of blame pointed at Ebon's choice as CEO in all matters.
  
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  RpiF have directly made BIllions for Rpi,corp with Ebon and his mrs schmoozing as a non-profit. Peddling a ,org domain. Trading off the Acorn Model B relationship to sell deep into education and Get that hackerbase following. While WE do all of their beta testing and community content, articles, project work for over a decade. More fool the fans…
  
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  Then, oh so clearly they sniff the real Money of Mass Industrial Provision and fk all of US right? Yup, double fk us and Thanks UK residents for all of that lovely Tax write-off and those giant Government contracts. B*stards the lot of em, still can't buy Four in any quantity. Ebon blew FOUR YEARS of our development with this bs 'supporting mum and popshops' my arse – NO they didn't support us. Begging wasn't enough, no channel but scalpers for pi4 for Years, unless you're a corp ordering 1000+
  
  I'll take the lesson on the chin – We can't sell what does not exist and Rpi Will Not have our back on warranty, ever. Glad we did no re-sales. The end of ARM dev for us completely.
  
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  We moved all dev to Ryzen 5 minis, #tiny10 and much Better Linux(s) @JeffGeerling

• God's chosen people need to make profits. There are still some Tel Aviv mansions without gold plated driveways 😢😢

• All my projects belong to microcontrollers now.

• Raspberry pi’s are worthless in the face of the new integrated mobile processors Intel is coming out with. They see the writing on the wall; of course they’re selling out.

• I don't think this will change much. They did what they set out to do, a company can make a profit and still sell these chips for next to nothing Raspberry Pi just proved it possible. I think this low cost market is here to stay.

• Someone said that once you IPO, your product is your stock price

• Speaking from the economic perspective, PI is a little like ARM in that they create conventions and loads of other manufacturers make up the full ecosystem. Thats where it stops. IOT is approaching an offering gap; now with things like nvidia Jetson, IOT holds a lot more potential for revenue streams, but enterprise integration is missing. Azure IOT shouldnt just be seen as a footnote because its the bridge between AD and copilot and everything else Azure. Every cloud provider is trying to make it easy to use their services for IOT, but deployment and security need to be formally addressed by the manufacturer for enterprise adoption. Thats where RPI ENT would have an advantage. Everyone that used pi for education and their own projects, with day jobs as SWEs will happily read the docs to target pi ent devices. Sorta in the way that ESP controllers led to an explosion of smart devices on amazon from companies we've never heard of, RPI ENT will make it easier for well known companies to develop more interesting devices and systems at scale with the IAC and CI/CD pipelines (security, access, and code coverage) SDLC in use today. RPI built up the reputational capital and experience to make that market offering and have it embraced, whereas Im not sure who else would.

• I can't even find a Pi Zero for less than 40-50 bucks, i don't know what you're on about

• I knew this was coming since 2017.
  Raspberry Pi (company) is much bigger than we think but they're just not telling us.
  with machine learning and AI the biggest thing right now, give it a decade or two and i see raspberry Pi competing amongst the alphabet boys. There's definitely a much more sinister but profitable endeavor behind it. The government and the big wealthy untouchables loves it when you can put tools into the hands of many children across the globe. Upton about to become the next billionaire.

• the other issue with going public is that there is the chance that some Elon tries to take it over

• Can anyone name a publicly traded company that is also consumer friendly long term after going thru the IPO process? No, neither can I…

• This is not exactly comforting to hear.
  I just started kind of following the SBC scene.
  I've been thinking about how fun it would be to build a cheap little PC and see what I could do with it, and maybe expose myself to other OS's. It's been quite a while since I built a PC, and messing around with 200-300$ in parts is much more palatable than 1-2k. lol.
  But hearing RPi is going public is one of those things where it suggests that in 5-10 years we're going to see a lot of changes that are anti-consumer. But it depends on how much of the stock is being made public too. If 70% is sticking with the founders, and 30% is going public there's still hope for a while.
  Regardless, it shouldn't affect this generation, and maybe not next, so there's still hope that RPi can release a Pro or Plus version of the R.Pi 5 board that can accept more RAM, has a faster clock speed / 8-cores and/or has an improved GPU.
  I keep looking at and bouncing between Raspberry, for the support, and Orange, for the specs, as the ideal for what I'd like to play around with, if I break down and start tinkering. If the R.Pi were just a little better, I would almost assuredly be sold, rather than considering an O.Pi lol.

• Hell to the no. The moment company goes from private control to shareholders via IPO, it's all over — only ruin is the result, ruin and the enshittification.

• if you think RPI will never go public, you are dreaming, no one say no to $$$, everything has a price, once it is popular enough, it will ditch the its main original goal and concentrate on the the $$ goal. All private companies goes public for one reason only and that is $$$.

• If an IPO lets them get rid of Upton, it'll be a net +ve

• Hate them doing this. Awful thing to do after years of marketing themselves as charitable. That WILL change if the list.

• Anyone watching from Azerbaijan? 🇦🇿

• the raspberry pi vision never really materialized. its less useful as an educational computer and more used by tech enthusiasts who need a little low power computer for various projects. they completely misjudged their customer base from the get go. its better off as a general purpose tech product and a publicly traded company is better at that.

  my hope is that the pluggable soc becomes the norm for portable gadgets where you dont need a new kb, screen and chassis every time you want to upgrade. replace the soc to replace the sluggish one and get another two years out of your devices.

• I miss the crazy hobbyist feeling that I got with the RPi, but in reality I haven't felt that in a few years. I had hopes when I heard the RPi5 was being released, but when I saw it was a more powerful 4 I gave up. I don't need "moar powur" or a replacment for a desktop computer

• Yes, they’re selling out. And no, I wouldn’t touch that stock with a ten foot usb cable.

• Only thing worse is vulture investors. I worked for an ISP in the late 90s when they did that. We went from "we don't have money for that now" to "We are selling your Sun workstation so we can make this months numbers. Here is a white box DOS PC to do your work.". OTOH it might bring enough money to the table to design a dual 1G Ethernet with bootable NVME board.

• Raspberry Pi isn’t your friend. If this wasn’t obvious when the CEO’s unhinged wife started swearing at & insulting customers on Mastodon, it should be obvious now.

• they are getting ready to make the last money before the ship sinks! for every new model they make they get more and more obsolete! and when they go on the stock market the greedy you-know-who will take control and it will become an evil greed machine like everything else they touch with their you-know-who fingers!

• I think there will eventually be 1 and 2GB versions of the Pi5. They should cost a lot less.

• To have completely open source hardware the processors have to use open instruction sets like RISC-V. It is rare to see RISC-V processors being open source so good luck with using only completely open source computer.

  But interesting Raspberry Pi is fairly similar to OpenAI with having a for profit wing and non profit foundation.
  I believe Wikipedia even has kinda similar thing with main Wikipedia being non profit and fandom wikis being for profit.

• Ok, I'm wrong, but 4:09 into the video. (And I know you had the correct name at the top of the screen anyway) I thought you were talking to Jason Statham. (Bee keeper). Ooops.

• R.I.P. Raspberry Pi. May your profits perpetually increase no matter the cost. Customer be damned.

• I love how Ebon Upton apparently thinks
  there will be "no change in focus" with this move. It's almost like he thinks that he'll get to make that decision. So cute. Gave me a good chuckle…

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