It’s like $100 per board now once you add a power supply and a case. More if you also add storage. Cheapest Intel system on Amazon is $139. The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability. That was kind of lost along the way.
The lower-end, power-efficient market is being rapidly devoured by the ESP32. A $20 Pi will still use much more power than an ESP32 while also being less reliable and still 3x the price.
The RPi company looked into the future and saw microcontrollers eating the lower end of the market, which is why they are now chasing performance.
Unfortunately IMO they are not executing on this well. The RPi 5 requires 5V at 5 amps to run properly. It's now near-impossible to run via the 5V header pins, no existing power supplies can support it, and at 25W of power consumption the Intel systems you mention are now serious competition.
> The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability
No, not really. If it was just affordability you could buy a used ProLiant server for the same price on Facebook Marketplace and have 20x the computing power.
Raspi has been about the perfect balance of: power consumption, affordability, form factor, and computational capability all in one.
If you can manage your project with a unit that is roughly 2x the form factor, you can get the same power consumption (less?!) with an N100, at the same cost, but double the processing power: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...
Latest Raspberry Pis are expensive but also quite powerful. If you want a cheap single board computer that can run Linux, you have the Pi Zero ($15). You also have the Pico ($4), which is an alternative to the ESP32.
I thought the point of RPi s easy connectivity to spi, i2c, pwm, and gpio with a powerful(1) filesystem and network stack behind it. What easy way to give a NUC spi, i2c, pwm, and gpio?
Affordability is gone, sure. But there are many other virtues of the platform. Low heat, power consumption, heat, weight, physical dimensions, and integration.
I think a better way would be to keep the foundation and spin off a company that manufactures all of that. Sell 49% of that company in an IPO and keep the majority stake in the foundation. This way they can raise money for expansion while keeping the mission in line.
This also signals very clear to investors what this enterprise is about.
This is already the setup, the foundation owns the trading company and it is the trading company going to IPO.
From a quick scan it's not clear to me what share of ownership of RPi ltd the foundation would retain post IPO other than the foundation will be selling at least some of its stake:
> The Offer would be comprised of new Shares to be issued by the Company and existing shares to be sold by certain existing shareholders, including the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Raspberry Pi's existing majority shareholder.
> I think a better way would be to keep the foundation and spin off a company that manufactures all of that. Sell 49% of that company in an IPO and keep the majority stake in the foundation. This way they can raise money for expansion while keeping the mission in line.
Makes me sad that they’ll now have to increase profits forever, instead of functioning on their mission and doing what’s right. This may mean moving manufacturing to China, using lower cost components, etc etc.
Yeah. I just don't see how they could possibly grow in a way that satisfies the stock market. The only way to create an appearance of such growth is to go Boeing and essentially burn down the house for warmth. For an organization like this, it's basically always step one on an irreversible death spiral.
> Makes me sad that they’ll now have to increase profits forever
Providing a return to shareholders does not require increasing profits. Investing constant or declining profits into acquisitions or share buybacks can provide the same returns to shareholders.
I'm pleased to see another British company actually stick to the London Stock Exchange. Many are starting to list themselves on the US stock market, Arm being at the top of my mind in terms of tech. I think I remember them losing 30 £100M+ companies to the US exchange last year including some big really big names. I know this phenomenon isn't isolated to the UK either. With all the issues in Hong Kong over the last few years, companies have fled there too.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.
It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US. I don't think that's good for anyone, including US folks. Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.
> Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.
Those might be factors but I'd wager the dominating factor to choosing to list in a US exchange is the monthly volume of ETF flow on the indexes you join. In the current world I think this factor dominates many others.
From memory at my previous company, that was on LSE AIM, the discussion around LSE wasn't about Brexit or anything like that, it was the amount of investment capital available in US exchanges. The US has definitely got something right with incentivising investment.
Trading becoming centralized in the US is a different thing from trading happening exclusively on the NYSE.
As far as I understand, we are so far away from that reality since Reg NMS that we are facing the opposite problems, if anything: A proliferation of markets that brokers are obliged to trade at in the interest of providing "the best price", the combination of which has created a giant industry of latency arbitrageurs.
> Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.
What's the risk here? That if the NYSE establishes a monopoly, it could extract a 0.5% tax on every trade?
I feel the theoretical possibility of wealth being extracted from you is somewhat insignificant compared to the actual extractions you are subjected to in the UK.
I'm sure those reasons are valid, but just the simple fact of the US stock market having much higher valuations than the UK market right now makes me wonder why they'd do an IPO in the UK. They'll get more money for the shares they sell in the US.
> I'm pleased to see another British company actually stick to the London Stock Exchange. Many are starting to list themselves on the US stock market, Arm being at the top of my mind in terms of tech.
London has never attracted tech companies. Even when I was in the field over 20 years ago the combined market cap of tech was tiny. Only smallish British companies IPOed on London.
ARM was small when it originally listed. Now it is large and was not British owned - why would they list in London.
> It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US.
Financial markets centralise for liquidity. IIRC some dual listed European companies are moving to London.
Dual class shares are part of the picture here. They are very common in the US, and allow founders to have their cake and eat it. UK regulators have historically frowned upon this, but that stance is beginning to soften.
I'm not sure what the real disadvantage is though. Like, as a British person I can easily buy shares in companies listed in the US. If a British company IPOs on the NYSE but keeps it's HQ and most employees in the UK, does that actually say anything about the UK economy, or just a bit about the LSE specifically and maybe some corporate law details?
There is a lot of general flight to safety in the US, but I think the UK is a special case. The UKs economic decline is irreversible at this point. Crumbling (literally) infrastructure, completely isolated elites, out of the EU, inability to build basically anything. Why hang around to find out where the bottom is...
Does it matter any longer which exchange things are listed on? I can trade any stock on any exchange regardless of where it is. I guess only trading hours and holiday schedule would make a difference.
I would like to think it's also partly a message that this move isn't about profit seeking. British companies do not have legal duty to maximise their profit. NYSE investors might not appreciate this foreign idea.
On top of that, IMO the vast majority of their value as a brand comes from the community that develops for and with the platform. See every review for the alternative SBC market (Orange Pi, Bana Pi, etc.) "Sure it's better/cheaper but they don't have the huge community..."
So, if they IPO, will they first be distributing equity to the community? Or are they just cash-grabbing a retirement play?
Pine64 has been doing much better in that matter for years, I've had a Pine64 since 2016 and a raspberry pi 4 running the same OS (dietpi) and software kept running hotter even though it got released 3 years later and for double the price
Does it feel like this was inevitable anyway? I had heard that the company was already focusing on OEMs and delivering their products to those companies first. Whereas in the early days the RPi company was positioning themselves as having an educational focus (and the hobbyists). I don't know how true this is, but is what I had read explaining the inability to get RPI4s and RPI5s over the past year.
It is quite sad though as they will now have an incentive to profit over 'provide', and it will be nice while it lasts.
> but is what I had read explaining the inability to get RPI4s and RPI5s over the past year.
RPi5 never really had a shortage; there was the couple of months of "preorder" during launch.
During the post-COVID extended Raspberry pi shortage, a big percentage of production went to keeping OEMs happy to avoid screwing customers that had designed in RPi products.
What's the warning at the start all about? Aren't they violating their own terms by serving it publicly on the internet?
> THIS ANNOUNCEMENT IS NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION, IN WHOLE OR PART, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR INTO OR FROM THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, SOUTH AFRICA, JAPAN OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION WHERE SUCH DISTRIBUTION WOULD BE UNLAWFUL.
IPO announcements need to come from approved/authoritative organisations. This one is distributed by the UK's authoritative organisation - RNS news. In the other territories, IPO announcements also have to be made by authoritative organisations. RNS is approved in the UK, but not the other territories.
I don’t know if LSE are obligated to follow laws in those countries, but they may add this disclaimer to help others who may be obligated to follow those laws?
Also I’m not in any of the jurisdictions mentioned, potentially there’s some kind of geoblocking on the document?
This is a classic disclaimer put on top of all types of financial documents, you can see it all the time on IPO's, mergers, any type of corporate actions like repurchase offers, shareholders / bondholders meetings etc.
My understanding is that the source knows they have no way of controlling the dissemination of the document, and thus use such disclaimer to attempt to push the responsibility to any party receiving the doc - "ah! see our disclaimer? you should not have read this doc, its on you now!"
Raspberry Pi did a lot to revolutionize the micro board/pc market, they truly had an amazing influence on the industry that I’m grateful for. Now a days they feel overpriced and underpowered, and their influence spurred a new market that has produced much better alternatives. This IPO just confirms this perspective for me. Thank you raspberry pi for what you did. But I doubt I’ll ever want to buy one again.
It depends upon how you look at it. Something like the Raspberry Pi is considerably more expensive. On the other hand, they started with a very low performance and weak feature set and have evolved into a product with good performance and a much richer feature set. Something like the Raspberry Pi Zero is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi, and its price is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi. Much of the price bloating features were a product of customer request. To be fair, they dropped many hints that it would increase the cost of the product.
From my understanding, support has also improved over the years. Raspberry Pi always had a bit of an edge in community support, but they also had a push to develop free resources for education markets and hobbyists. The former has been traditionally been a high-priced add-on. The latter has traditionally been provided by third parties (more reasonably priced, but still at extra cost). None of this has disappeared, though it does appear to be less prominent than in the past.
I think the big change is in the competition. SBCs were traditionally high cost poorly supported products or even higher cost well supported products (though you were unlikely to get support unless you were a business). Now we have a flood of low cost poorly supported products, albeit with slightly higher standards for support than in times past.
They've always felt overpriced to me imho - not intrinsically at the sticker-price level, but the workarounds needed to obtain constantly-out-of-stock units, get good-enough on/off functionality, good-enough power-supply, good-enough SD cards eliminated the savings of the device itself being cheap.
I actually appreciate that the Pi5 has finally solved the on/off problem, and would be willing to pay the premium price for that when I'm interested in buying a new SBC.
I’ve tried so many times but I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi. It seems well suited for making a NAS or plex server, but other than that, idk. Everything else I want to experiment with is better served by an arduino.
I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi.
The practical purposes for an RPi have diminished. They're still good for when you need something small, light or low power. But the market for refurb mini-PCs really replaces most of the instances where you're just looking for a cheap, but semi-powerful, computer.
And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor.
A Raspberry Pi a fairly tiny computer that can run a "real" OS, and that has a fair amount of GPIO that can be bought new somewhat-inexpensively. It has storage that is easily-removed and swapped (whether for good, or for bad).
If all a person needs or wants is a fairly tiny computer and it doesn't need to be new/shiny, then there's off-lease corpo boxes that are faster/better/cheaper.
If all a person needs or wants is some GPIO to hack on hardware with, and doesn't want a real OS on the back end of things, then maybe an Arduino or ESP32 or RP2040 or something might be better and cheaper.
But if a person needs or wants all of that in one box, then: A Raspberry Pi may well be the right approach. (Some folks like hacking with a real OS; this is fine. We used to use things like parallel ports for this in the PC space but those are long gone.)
Or: If a person needs or wants a well-tuned system that they can just download and use specialized images for and write to a MicroSD card, then: A Raspberry Pi can become desirable.
---
For instance: I use a Pi 4 to play movies with over SMB. I could do that a thousand or more different ways, but using LibreElec on a Pi 4 is the easiest way for me to get there -- just download it, stuff it into an SD card, and boot it up. It becomes an appliance, and this appliance is similar or identical to many other appliances; this makes supporting it easy. (And if I want to do something different with that hardware today, it takes only a few seconds to swap its storage for something completely different -- and swap it back later.)
Or: 3D printing. I can do what many others have done before me and sneaker-net gcode from the PC to the printer, or I can use a Raspberry Pi and a standardized Octoprint image to put that printer on the network instead. Now my printer is a network appliance.
There are a lot of suggestions here for things that can be done on any PC rather than a particular piece of hardware (DNS server, VM host, email server) so to throw out the one genuine "something the Raspberry Pi is compelling for, not just able to do too":
IP KVM as with the Pi KVM.
It utilizes the CSI interface for the capture without needing to do it through USB or expensive PCIe addon cards like a normal PC, the USB OTG is used to act as keyboard/mouse/disc drive/usb ethernet, the GPIO is used to control the motherboard power/reset pins, the serial pins are used to provide a console interface in case you need to reconfigure the static IP, some other pins are used to drive a small LCD display telling you the IP and status of the device, the Ethernet and Wi-Fi give connectivity options to access the local webpage where the hardware accelerated encode helps stream the data to you. The local uSD storage is plenty for storing the local ISO images and it's a full Arch Linux system in case you ever need to do anything else (like wget an image directly to the device remotely).
Not only is the hardware extremely well suited (capture, the IO pins, the decoder, the network interfaces, the minimal storage) to the exact use case but it's used in a way that doesn't really make sense to use an Arduino and would cost a lot more (in dollars, power, and space) to get a standard mini PC to do these things.
Of course I've owned 6 Raspberry Pi boards over the last 12 years and this is the only one I ever found to be worthwhile. The others were just for the novelty.
One thing arduinos don't do is things which require a GPU. So if you have a project which you want to output to a display but you also want it very low powered, because it e.g. runs 24/7, a PI is IMO the best device. Something like a Home Assistant dashboard display or a DIY smart mirror for example.
Currently running virtual machines:
* Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io/) - with USB passthrough of USB stick to read out my digital electricity/gas meters, Zigbee and Z-Wave
* Homebridge (to allow my Eufy video doorbell to work with Homekit)
* Pihole
All are running from iSCSI storage served by my Synology NAS.
I am running an older Pi (3) on demand in my garden as a client for my media server to play music on garden speakers.
I use an old 1st gen Pi Model B+ as a ppp server for my Tandy 1000 SX to connect to the Internet. I can telnet in and adjust stuff if needed. Very handy and fun to play Zork on sdf.org through it.
Similar issue, I have an old desktop as a server already to do all the heavy processing stuff. Only finally found use for RPi to be the brains of my 3d printers.
I run a Mastodon server in a VPC. It's a Rails all and sucks up all the CPU and RAM you can throw at it. A while back when I was almost at my VPC's limits and didn't want to throw a bunch of money at it, I spun up Sidekiq worker VMs on my RPi. That freed up a lot of resources I could repurpose for frontend caching.
Absolutely correct. The form factor of a Pi zero (2) may be good in a handheld but you can easily get one from China or a PSP and get a great experience.
Arduino? You mean the ide or the actual hardware? It's been superceded by esp32.
I wish they could make a more user friendly rpi that is all in one: router, smart tv, adblock, vpn, private cloud, private media server, wireless charging pad, universal miracast/airplay/chromecast.
They have a touch screen, speakers, and control the lights via gpio. I use the same thing to set timers, play the internet radio in the morning to wake me up, and put the lights off.
Arm listing in the US was apparently quite a blow to the London Stock Exchange. What kind of decisions drive a company to choose one exchange over another?
The biggest reason is access to capital. There's lots of institutional investors who are going to primarily invest in US equities, so if you're on the US stock market that's good. Even if those institutional investors do look at worldwide equities they're going to be limited in how much they allocate to it. It's also easier for investors - a single regulatory environment, no currency risk etc.
This used to be mitigated by the fact that other countries would have their own pools of capital, like domestic pension funds but with the reforms to pensions UK pension funds are no longer a particularly good source of capital on the UK stock exchange.
I badly wish that chip manufacturers were required to produce single board computers with their outdated inventory. Or at least offer the chips for sale with documentation to reduce e-waste.
Apple’s A* and M* chips for example should all be on SBCs.
If you’re going to consume earth’s resources to produce these things, tell humanity how to repurpose them.
My visceral reaction to this was “well shit, RPi was supposed to be a non profit to lower the costs of computers, and now they’re going to be another boring computer company”, and that makes me sad. I know that Rapsberry Pi has been a dual for-profit and non-profit for quite awhile, so in theory nothing really changes, but it feels a bit weird.
However, it appears that unambiguously for-profit companies have managed to make affordable SBCs (e.g. Hardkernel, Nvidia), without having the same constraints of trying to save the world associated with it. Maybe Raspberry Pi IPOing will increase availability and funding?
Tough to say. I haven’t actually used a name-brand Raspberry Pi for awhile, and have opted for a competitor for the last several years.
That would be cool. I would like to follow their journey. Their numbers, their earning calls etc.
I would like to see more smaller tech companies on the stock market. The giants like Microsoft and Google are way to hard to understand because they have so many products and so much stuff in the pipeline.
Are there any interesting examples of smaller tech companies which are publicly traded?
Superior money milking machine without the pressure from shareholders, because they can focus into the benefits of the end users with few products and long term sustainability.
No need to rush for increased profits every quarter so that someone can sell or admire their stocks.
It seems I lost my faith in Raspberry Pis a lot sooner than most people. I gave up on them around the RPi3 days because it stopped working with the random chargers I had just laying around my house. I traced the issue back to my power supply having too much voltage ripple, with it still being within the spec for USB. Essentially, I needed to run it with their charger which was built to work better than industry standard.
This, coupled with the mini HDMI ports basically requiring an adapter, means that you more than total the cost of the Pi just in peripherals to get it up and running. It all seems like a waste of money anymore.
It doesn't even matter to me. I stopped using them personally and have been pushing back against them professionally. They have bad performance, bad thermals, many limitations in the peripherals, are not reliable, and are impossible to get.
Why don't they license their name to other entities, essentially allow approved clones? Muddying your non-profit goal by operating a for-profit, publicly-traded company seems suboptimal.
I can't remember the last time I actually used a Raspberry Pi. These days there are millions of cheaper, more powerful, "Raspberry Pi compatible" boards that are actually stocked.
I don't see any reason to even need one of these in 2024.
Hopefully this will give the average consumer the ability to give some direction as to the development of new versions. I'd very much like to see a new PI that doesn't have wifi, bluetooth or any other wireless technology.
The Pi isn't one thing - it's a group of computers at different prices - you can develop on the expensive one and run your production code on a much cheaper one.
a weird source to receive this news, nevertheless it seems that this is another evolution of the commercial arm of the company.
there can still be potential benefits of this move for the foundation's goals. economies of scale and increased commercial embedded use cases can push for adoption of ARM in basic computing.
i just hope that they finally set up their own distribution as it is still a pain to buy their devices for a fair price.
I called this back in 2012. Despite all their talk of being a non-profit and changing the world, it always felt this was more of a "feel good" thing than their actual mission.
Their "do no evil" phase lasted pretty long at least compared to places like OpenAI at least. At the end of the day are there any significant companies that managed to maintain a mission that wasn't "make tons of money for already rich people"?
Hiring a proud surveillance cop to sell surveillance cop stuff to governments must have been a boon if they're considering an IPO. Zero consequences for being assholes to critics then lying about the criticism to the press.
It’s like $100 per board now once you add a power supply and a case. More if you also add storage. Cheapest Intel system on Amazon is $139. The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability. That was kind of lost along the way.
The lower-end, power-efficient market is being rapidly devoured by the ESP32. A $20 Pi will still use much more power than an ESP32 while also being less reliable and still 3x the price.
The RPi company looked into the future and saw microcontrollers eating the lower end of the market, which is why they are now chasing performance.
Unfortunately IMO they are not executing on this well. The RPi 5 requires 5V at 5 amps to run properly. It's now near-impossible to run via the 5V header pins, no existing power supplies can support it, and at 25W of power consumption the Intel systems you mention are now serious competition.
EDIT: actually it's worse than that. Here's a $99 Intel system that claims 6W power consumption: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKXL2MPM?ref=product_details&th=...
Aside from GPIO headers it's hard to justify a Pi 5 over that on any grounds.
> The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability
No, not really. If it was just affordability you could buy a used ProLiant server for the same price on Facebook Marketplace and have 20x the computing power.
Raspi has been about the perfect balance of: power consumption, affordability, form factor, and computational capability all in one.
If you can manage your project with a unit that is roughly 2x the form factor, you can get the same power consumption (less?!) with an N100, at the same cost, but double the processing power: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...
Latest Raspberry Pis are expensive but also quite powerful. If you want a cheap single board computer that can run Linux, you have the Pi Zero ($15). You also have the Pico ($4), which is an alternative to the ESP32.
I thought the point of RPi s easy connectivity to spi, i2c, pwm, and gpio with a powerful(1) filesystem and network stack behind it. What easy way to give a NUC spi, i2c, pwm, and gpio?
(1) esp-idf is not in the same league as linux.
On the other hand, a Pi zero is <$10. I remember them being $1 at Microcenter for a time.
Is the cheapest Intel system as power sipping as the Pi's?
>The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability. That was kind of lost along the way.
Now the point is about the coolness factor. Which is measured by the Euclidean distance from architecture X to x86.
Affordability is gone, sure. But there are many other virtues of the platform. Low heat, power consumption, heat, weight, physical dimensions, and integration.
You can get a SFFPC with 7th Gen i5 for like $40. Apart from low power cost and form factor (and I guess gpio), you would probably just get the SFFPC
And overall size. I hope they build more smaller form factors like the Pico and the Zero. That's what differentiates them and the rest.
I don't think inflation is Rasberry Pi Ltds fault.
I think a better way would be to keep the foundation and spin off a company that manufactures all of that. Sell 49% of that company in an IPO and keep the majority stake in the foundation. This way they can raise money for expansion while keeping the mission in line.
This also signals very clear to investors what this enterprise is about.
This is already the setup, the foundation owns the trading company and it is the trading company going to IPO.
From a quick scan it's not clear to me what share of ownership of RPi ltd the foundation would retain post IPO other than the foundation will be selling at least some of its stake:
> The Offer would be comprised of new Shares to be issued by the Company and existing shares to be sold by certain existing shareholders, including the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Raspberry Pi's existing majority shareholder.
Isn't this already how it works? Raspberry Pi Ltd is a different company to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
What are the economics of buying into a stock that has a 51% stakeholder, and doesn't pay dividends, outside of "line goes up"?
I know this is kind of a standard in tech, but it still eludes me where the value of the stock is.
> I think a better way would be to keep the foundation and spin off a company that manufactures all of that. Sell 49% of that company in an IPO and keep the majority stake in the foundation. This way they can raise money for expansion while keeping the mission in line.
Ah yes, the OpenAI approach :)
I’m not really sure you get what the smell of money does to most people
Makes me sad that they’ll now have to increase profits forever, instead of functioning on their mission and doing what’s right. This may mean moving manufacturing to China, using lower cost components, etc etc.
The first order bit of better outreach is a low price point, which they've completely lost the plot on.
If going public is what takes them to realize it, I'll cheer it on.
Yeah. I just don't see how they could possibly grow in a way that satisfies the stock market. The only way to create an appearance of such growth is to go Boeing and essentially burn down the house for warmth. For an organization like this, it's basically always step one on an irreversible death spiral.
> Makes me sad that they’ll now have to increase profits forever
Providing a return to shareholders does not require increasing profits. Investing constant or declining profits into acquisitions or share buybacks can provide the same returns to shareholders.
What is "right"? They haven't been a good value for over 2 years.
Lower cost of components doesn't mean lower quality. What made the cost lower is logistics and the availability of components within the region.
Yup, cue the imminent enshittification. E.g. your Pi6 will require sign-in and come with ads.
I'm pleased to see another British company actually stick to the London Stock Exchange. Many are starting to list themselves on the US stock market, Arm being at the top of my mind in terms of tech. I think I remember them losing 30 £100M+ companies to the US exchange last year including some big really big names. I know this phenomenon isn't isolated to the UK either. With all the issues in Hong Kong over the last few years, companies have fled there too.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.
It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US. I don't think that's good for anyone, including US folks. Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.
> Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.
Those might be factors but I'd wager the dominating factor to choosing to list in a US exchange is the monthly volume of ETF flow on the indexes you join. In the current world I think this factor dominates many others.
Last I read (https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance...) companies seem to be undervalued on the LSE, it seems to be like if I ran a company I might be leaving money on the table listing there.
Agree that centralisation isn't ideal.
From memory at my previous company, that was on LSE AIM, the discussion around LSE wasn't about Brexit or anything like that, it was the amount of investment capital available in US exchanges. The US has definitely got something right with incentivising investment.
Trading becoming centralized in the US is a different thing from trading happening exclusively on the NYSE.
As far as I understand, we are so far away from that reality since Reg NMS that we are facing the opposite problems, if anything: A proliferation of markets that brokers are obliged to trade at in the interest of providing "the best price", the combination of which has created a giant industry of latency arbitrageurs.
> Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.
What's the risk here? That if the NYSE establishes a monopoly, it could extract a 0.5% tax on every trade?
I feel the theoretical possibility of wealth being extracted from you is somewhat insignificant compared to the actual extractions you are subjected to in the UK.
I'm sure those reasons are valid, but just the simple fact of the US stock market having much higher valuations than the UK market right now makes me wonder why they'd do an IPO in the UK. They'll get more money for the shares they sell in the US.
> I'm pleased to see another British company actually stick to the London Stock Exchange. Many are starting to list themselves on the US stock market, Arm being at the top of my mind in terms of tech.
London has never attracted tech companies. Even when I was in the field over 20 years ago the combined market cap of tech was tiny. Only smallish British companies IPOed on London.
ARM was small when it originally listed. Now it is large and was not British owned - why would they list in London.
> It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US.
Financial markets centralise for liquidity. IIRC some dual listed European companies are moving to London.
There's an excellent book just out about this and how the US has taken over the UK business world: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199503848-vassal-state
Dual class shares are part of the picture here. They are very common in the US, and allow founders to have their cake and eat it. UK regulators have historically frowned upon this, but that stance is beginning to soften.
I'm not sure what the real disadvantage is though. Like, as a British person I can easily buy shares in companies listed in the US. If a British company IPOs on the NYSE but keeps it's HQ and most employees in the UK, does that actually say anything about the UK economy, or just a bit about the LSE specifically and maybe some corporate law details?
There is a lot of general flight to safety in the US, but I think the UK is a special case. The UKs economic decline is irreversible at this point. Crumbling (literally) infrastructure, completely isolated elites, out of the EU, inability to build basically anything. Why hang around to find out where the bottom is...
Does it matter any longer which exchange things are listed on? I can trade any stock on any exchange regardless of where it is. I guess only trading hours and holiday schedule would make a difference.
It hasn't gone well for several UK companies listing through SPACs on US exchanges recently. Think that's given plenty of reason for a rethink.
I just wish they would let Pi users in on pre-IPO shares like Reddit
Hopefully the proposed British ISA will help make things better.
I would like to think it's also partly a message that this move isn't about profit seeking. British companies do not have legal duty to maximise their profit. NYSE investors might not appreciate this foreign idea.
Do not do it!
The mission was always to produce quality low cost computers for hobbyists and kids with open source software.
The moment you IPO you will have shareholders demanding you put profit before people and the users will always lose in that deal.
On top of that, IMO the vast majority of their value as a brand comes from the community that develops for and with the platform. See every review for the alternative SBC market (Orange Pi, Bana Pi, etc.) "Sure it's better/cheaper but they don't have the huge community..."
So, if they IPO, will they first be distributing equity to the community? Or are they just cash-grabbing a retirement play?
Pine64 has been doing much better in that matter for years, I've had a Pine64 since 2016 and a raspberry pi 4 running the same OS (dietpi) and software kept running hotter even though it got released 3 years later and for double the price
Does it feel like this was inevitable anyway? I had heard that the company was already focusing on OEMs and delivering their products to those companies first. Whereas in the early days the RPi company was positioning themselves as having an educational focus (and the hobbyists). I don't know how true this is, but is what I had read explaining the inability to get RPI4s and RPI5s over the past year.
It is quite sad though as they will now have an incentive to profit over 'provide', and it will be nice while it lasts.
> but is what I had read explaining the inability to get RPI4s and RPI5s over the past year.
RPi5 never really had a shortage; there was the couple of months of "preorder" during launch.
During the post-COVID extended Raspberry pi shortage, a big percentage of production went to keeping OEMs happy to avoid screwing customers that had designed in RPi products.
What's the warning at the start all about? Aren't they violating their own terms by serving it publicly on the internet?
> THIS ANNOUNCEMENT IS NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION, IN WHOLE OR PART, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR INTO OR FROM THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, SOUTH AFRICA, JAPAN OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION WHERE SUCH DISTRIBUTION WOULD BE UNLAWFUL.
IPO announcements need to come from approved/authoritative organisations. This one is distributed by the UK's authoritative organisation - RNS news. In the other territories, IPO announcements also have to be made by authoritative organisations. RNS is approved in the UK, but not the other territories.
I don’t know if LSE are obligated to follow laws in those countries, but they may add this disclaimer to help others who may be obligated to follow those laws?
Also I’m not in any of the jurisdictions mentioned, potentially there’s some kind of geoblocking on the document?
This is a classic disclaimer put on top of all types of financial documents, you can see it all the time on IPO's, mergers, any type of corporate actions like repurchase offers, shareholders / bondholders meetings etc.
My understanding is that the source knows they have no way of controlling the dissemination of the document, and thus use such disclaimer to attempt to push the responsibility to any party receiving the doc - "ah! see our disclaimer? you should not have read this doc, its on you now!"
Read the next 2 paras. It's SOP for for listings in the UK under the FSMA.
Raspberry Pi did a lot to revolutionize the micro board/pc market, they truly had an amazing influence on the industry that I’m grateful for. Now a days they feel overpriced and underpowered, and their influence spurred a new market that has produced much better alternatives. This IPO just confirms this perspective for me. Thank you raspberry pi for what you did. But I doubt I’ll ever want to buy one again.
It depends upon how you look at it. Something like the Raspberry Pi is considerably more expensive. On the other hand, they started with a very low performance and weak feature set and have evolved into a product with good performance and a much richer feature set. Something like the Raspberry Pi Zero is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi, and its price is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi. Much of the price bloating features were a product of customer request. To be fair, they dropped many hints that it would increase the cost of the product.
From my understanding, support has also improved over the years. Raspberry Pi always had a bit of an edge in community support, but they also had a push to develop free resources for education markets and hobbyists. The former has been traditionally been a high-priced add-on. The latter has traditionally been provided by third parties (more reasonably priced, but still at extra cost). None of this has disappeared, though it does appear to be less prominent than in the past.
I think the big change is in the competition. SBCs were traditionally high cost poorly supported products or even higher cost well supported products (though you were unlikely to get support unless you were a business). Now we have a flood of low cost poorly supported products, albeit with slightly higher standards for support than in times past.
You pay for the OS support. Alternative SBCs are much harder to get working and develop on.
What are the better alternatives? I don’t think any have anywhere near the level of software and community support nor stability.
They've always felt overpriced to me imho - not intrinsically at the sticker-price level, but the workarounds needed to obtain constantly-out-of-stock units, get good-enough on/off functionality, good-enough power-supply, good-enough SD cards eliminated the savings of the device itself being cheap.
I actually appreciate that the Pi5 has finally solved the on/off problem, and would be willing to pay the premium price for that when I'm interested in buying a new SBC.
> Now a days they feel overpriced and underpowered
They've been underpowered since day 1. That hasn't stopped them being successful.
I agree, and I would add that I think this IPO is the beginning of the end of what we were used to.
The company will end up the way many companies go after an IPO, the importance of product drops in relation to that of shareholder profit.
What are the much better alternatives? I’m not really aware of any
I’ve tried so many times but I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi. It seems well suited for making a NAS or plex server, but other than that, idk. Everything else I want to experiment with is better served by an arduino.
And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor.
A Raspberry Pi a fairly tiny computer that can run a "real" OS, and that has a fair amount of GPIO that can be bought new somewhat-inexpensively. It has storage that is easily-removed and swapped (whether for good, or for bad).
If all a person needs or wants is a fairly tiny computer and it doesn't need to be new/shiny, then there's off-lease corpo boxes that are faster/better/cheaper.
If all a person needs or wants is some GPIO to hack on hardware with, and doesn't want a real OS on the back end of things, then maybe an Arduino or ESP32 or RP2040 or something might be better and cheaper.
But if a person needs or wants all of that in one box, then: A Raspberry Pi may well be the right approach. (Some folks like hacking with a real OS; this is fine. We used to use things like parallel ports for this in the PC space but those are long gone.)
Or: If a person needs or wants a well-tuned system that they can just download and use specialized images for and write to a MicroSD card, then: A Raspberry Pi can become desirable.
---
For instance: I use a Pi 4 to play movies with over SMB. I could do that a thousand or more different ways, but using LibreElec on a Pi 4 is the easiest way for me to get there -- just download it, stuff it into an SD card, and boot it up. It becomes an appliance, and this appliance is similar or identical to many other appliances; this makes supporting it easy. (And if I want to do something different with that hardware today, it takes only a few seconds to swap its storage for something completely different -- and swap it back later.)
Or: 3D printing. I can do what many others have done before me and sneaker-net gcode from the PC to the printer, or I can use a Raspberry Pi and a standardized Octoprint image to put that printer on the network instead. Now my printer is a network appliance.
There are a lot of suggestions here for things that can be done on any PC rather than a particular piece of hardware (DNS server, VM host, email server) so to throw out the one genuine "something the Raspberry Pi is compelling for, not just able to do too":
IP KVM as with the Pi KVM.
It utilizes the CSI interface for the capture without needing to do it through USB or expensive PCIe addon cards like a normal PC, the USB OTG is used to act as keyboard/mouse/disc drive/usb ethernet, the GPIO is used to control the motherboard power/reset pins, the serial pins are used to provide a console interface in case you need to reconfigure the static IP, some other pins are used to drive a small LCD display telling you the IP and status of the device, the Ethernet and Wi-Fi give connectivity options to access the local webpage where the hardware accelerated encode helps stream the data to you. The local uSD storage is plenty for storing the local ISO images and it's a full Arch Linux system in case you ever need to do anything else (like wget an image directly to the device remotely).
Not only is the hardware extremely well suited (capture, the IO pins, the decoder, the network interfaces, the minimal storage) to the exact use case but it's used in a way that doesn't really make sense to use an Arduino and would cost a lot more (in dollars, power, and space) to get a standard mini PC to do these things.
Of course I've owned 6 Raspberry Pi boards over the last 12 years and this is the only one I ever found to be worthwhile. The others were just for the novelty.
One thing arduinos don't do is things which require a GPU. So if you have a project which you want to output to a display but you also want it very low powered, because it e.g. runs 24/7, a PI is IMO the best device. Something like a Home Assistant dashboard display or a DIY smart mirror for example.
Pi-hole: https://pi-hole.net
Sounds like a lack of imagination to me!
The official Raspberry Pi New page has a least a few featured projects every week: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/
The MagPi has articles and a whole monthly magazine on various projects and use cases: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com
I am running a hypervisor (https://blogs.vmware.com/arm/2023/12/15/esxi-arm-fling-1-15-...) on my Raspberry Pi 4. Rock solid.
Currently running virtual machines: * Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io/) - with USB passthrough of USB stick to read out my digital electricity/gas meters, Zigbee and Z-Wave * Homebridge (to allow my Eufy video doorbell to work with Homekit) * Pihole
All are running from iSCSI storage served by my Synology NAS.
I am running an older Pi (3) on demand in my garden as a client for my media server to play music on garden speakers.
I use an old 1st gen Pi Model B+ as a ppp server for my Tandy 1000 SX to connect to the Internet. I can telnet in and adjust stuff if needed. Very handy and fun to play Zork on sdf.org through it.
Similar issue, I have an old desktop as a server already to do all the heavy processing stuff. Only finally found use for RPi to be the brains of my 3d printers.
I run a Mastodon server in a VPC. It's a Rails all and sucks up all the CPU and RAM you can throw at it. A while back when I was almost at my VPC's limits and didn't want to throw a bunch of money at it, I spun up Sidekiq worker VMs on my RPi. That freed up a lot of resources I could repurpose for frontend caching.
I think they are mostly for hobbyists and students so maybe being pragmatic is not the top concern.
Absolutely correct. The form factor of a Pi zero (2) may be good in a handheld but you can easily get one from China or a PSP and get a great experience.
Arduino? You mean the ide or the actual hardware? It's been superceded by esp32.
I use my 3B solely for adblocking via Pi-hole and it works fine most of the time
I wish they could make a more user friendly rpi that is all in one: router, smart tv, adblock, vpn, private cloud, private media server, wireless charging pad, universal miracast/airplay/chromecast.
I have home automation done with rpi.
They have a touch screen, speakers, and control the lights via gpio. I use the same thing to set timers, play the internet radio in the morning to wake me up, and put the lights off.
Not well suited for NAS at all. Too limited in IO and PCI lanes.
Run an email server, send triggers on subject keywords, automate stuff.
home assistant and small/quiet/cheap remote syncthing nodes.
>It seems well suited for making a NAS
No ECC memory, thus no.
If I had a dollar for every time I've seen the words "Shareholder Value". Hopefully that particular disease can be kept away for a while.
The disease of Enshittification ?
Arm listing in the US was apparently quite a blow to the London Stock Exchange. What kind of decisions drive a company to choose one exchange over another?
The biggest reason is access to capital. There's lots of institutional investors who are going to primarily invest in US equities, so if you're on the US stock market that's good. Even if those institutional investors do look at worldwide equities they're going to be limited in how much they allocate to it. It's also easier for investors - a single regulatory environment, no currency risk etc.
This used to be mitigated by the fact that other countries would have their own pools of capital, like domestic pension funds but with the reforms to pensions UK pension funds are no longer a particularly good source of capital on the UK stock exchange.
I badly wish that chip manufacturers were required to produce single board computers with their outdated inventory. Or at least offer the chips for sale with documentation to reduce e-waste.
Apple’s A* and M* chips for example should all be on SBCs.
If you’re going to consume earth’s resources to produce these things, tell humanity how to repurpose them.
Good time to talk about the rPi alternatives?
My visceral reaction to this was “well shit, RPi was supposed to be a non profit to lower the costs of computers, and now they’re going to be another boring computer company”, and that makes me sad. I know that Rapsberry Pi has been a dual for-profit and non-profit for quite awhile, so in theory nothing really changes, but it feels a bit weird.
However, it appears that unambiguously for-profit companies have managed to make affordable SBCs (e.g. Hardkernel, Nvidia), without having the same constraints of trying to save the world associated with it. Maybe Raspberry Pi IPOing will increase availability and funding?
Tough to say. I haven’t actually used a name-brand Raspberry Pi for awhile, and have opted for a competitor for the last several years.
Please no. They make good, beloved products that are fairly high quality.
Wild how far they are from their original stated goals. Maybe they were just full of it the whole time.
That would be cool. I would like to follow their journey. Their numbers, their earning calls etc.
I would like to see more smaller tech companies on the stock market. The giants like Microsoft and Google are way to hard to understand because they have so many products and so much stuff in the pipeline.
Are there any interesting examples of smaller tech companies which are publicly traded?
Not so sure.
Interesting opposite: Valve
Superior money milking machine without the pressure from shareholders, because they can focus into the benefits of the end users with few products and long term sustainability.
No need to rush for increased profits every quarter so that someone can sell or admire their stocks.
There was a good interview with Eben Upton back in Feb on this topic (and others): https://hackaday.com/2024/02/28/floss-weekly-episode-772-ras...
Let's normalize private industry again.
It seems I lost my faith in Raspberry Pis a lot sooner than most people. I gave up on them around the RPi3 days because it stopped working with the random chargers I had just laying around my house. I traced the issue back to my power supply having too much voltage ripple, with it still being within the spec for USB. Essentially, I needed to run it with their charger which was built to work better than industry standard.
This, coupled with the mini HDMI ports basically requiring an adapter, means that you more than total the cost of the Pi just in peripherals to get it up and running. It all seems like a waste of money anymore.
It doesn't even matter to me. I stopped using them personally and have been pushing back against them professionally. They have bad performance, bad thermals, many limitations in the peripherals, are not reliable, and are impossible to get.
And will be bought by private equity and rode into the ground not long after.
Why don't they license their name to other entities, essentially allow approved clones? Muddying your non-profit goal by operating a for-profit, publicly-traded company seems suboptimal.
Same old story, the customer will shift from the people buying it to the shareholders. This would be a shame.
It seems to me RPi kind of lost the attributes that made it interesting in the first place.
That's dissapointing. I was hoping they'd be happy getting enough revenue to stay private. What do they need to raise capital for?
I can't remember the last time I actually used a Raspberry Pi. These days there are millions of cheaper, more powerful, "Raspberry Pi compatible" boards that are actually stocked. I don't see any reason to even need one of these in 2024.
Hopefully this will give the average consumer the ability to give some direction as to the development of new versions. I'd very much like to see a new PI that doesn't have wifi, bluetooth or any other wireless technology.
The Pi isn't one thing - it's a group of computers at different prices - you can develop on the expensive one and run your production code on a much cheaper one.
a weird source to receive this news, nevertheless it seems that this is another evolution of the commercial arm of the company.
there can still be potential benefits of this move for the foundation's goals. economies of scale and increased commercial embedded use cases can push for adoption of ARM in basic computing.
i just hope that they finally set up their own distribution as it is still a pain to buy their devices for a fair price.
I called this back in 2012. Despite all their talk of being a non-profit and changing the world, it always felt this was more of a "feel good" thing than their actual mission.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is still a non profit, isn't it?
I think you're confusing Trading with the Foundation. Go and have a look at the websites to educate yourself on the difference.
https://www.raspberrypi.com
https://www.raspberrypi.org
There's pleanty of information in the 'about' pages.
Their "do no evil" phase lasted pretty long at least compared to places like OpenAI at least. At the end of the day are there any significant companies that managed to maintain a mission that wasn't "make tons of money for already rich people"?
This is why we need Exit to Community: https:/.e2c.how
Intel N100 has sent raspberry pi to the drawer.
That prediction was just too easy [0], and it has now been finally admitted.
Time to them to dump their shares on the community.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28773122
that would explain the focus on services like the VNC replacement they've released
those won't be free for long
Can you buy the shares in Australia?
Farewell Raspberry Pi.
What are some alternative boards with comparable specs?
Let the enshittification begin
IPO means company already gone shit. I will stick to ESP32.
How the enshittification begins..
[dead]
Enshittification incoming.
R
Hiring a proud surveillance cop to sell surveillance cop stuff to governments must have been a boon if they're considering an IPO. Zero consequences for being assholes to critics then lying about the criticism to the press.