3 Millionth Raspberry Pi Sold

Pic fr yesterday: L-R @CraigArgh, @EbenUpton, me, the Queen, @TheDukeOfYork. We’re all still a bit wobbly post-Queen. pic.twitter.com/cKmHRK4zpA

— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) June 10, 2014

In a post to their official blog, The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the sale of their 3 millionth Raspberry Pi single board computer. The milestone was actually achieved over a month ago, but their manufacturing partners’ sales figures lag behind the actual sales by several weeks. The announcement times nicely with the Foundation’s visit to Buckingham Palace for a gathering of UK technology firms. And of course, Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and Prince Andrew were on hand for the event. No big deal, right?

Raspberry Pi clearly has a lot of momentum. The last major sales milestone, 2 million units, was achieved at the end of October 2013. Since the board’s initial release, it has received many software updates, a few hardware improvements, and additional peripherals such as the camera module. Last April, the foundation announced the Compute Module, a new version of the Raspberry Pi which squeezes the core components of the Raspberry Pi into a board the size of a small stick of RAM.

The UK-based Raspberry Pi Foundation’s momentum hasn’t gone unnoticed by the British Monarchy. From an article in the Guardian about the event at Buckingham Palace:

I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve met in the tech industry who started out on a BBC,” says the Duke of York, who’s in a lively mood, getting hands-on with the tech demonstrations.

He appears fully versed with the Raspberry Pi already. “What people are applying the Raspberry Pi to outstrips any of the things you intended it for, doesn’t it?” he says, surveying a table showing the mini-computers running a game of Minecraft and Space Bear – a computer-equipped teddy bear that relived Felix Baumgartner’s near-space jump in August 2013.

“Obviously we’re still blown away by the level of interest in the Pi,” said Eben Upton to Make:. “As children of the 1980s this is a fun milestone for us because we’ve exceeded the sales total for the Amstrad CPC, the second-best-selling of the UK-designed 8-bit computers. That only leaves the mighty ZX Spectrum (the Timex to you), with 5 million units, to beat. (Pay no attention to the C64, with north of 12 million units globally – now that’s a challenge).”

Any bets on when they’ll hit 4 million sold?