And I think they'll continue to sell very well from brand name alone. That won't last forever, but it's not going to disappear next year either. They've had pretty flat unit volume the last 3 years, it's not about to nosedive out of the blue the same as volume is not about to continue growing the same as it used to (even though they launch more and more product lines).
The differentiator for the Pi line was support for the capability at the price point, but the competition for the mainline Pis is no longer "random ARM boards with no driver updates", so no longer is that support actually the differentiator for the Pi either. With the lowest cost Pi 5 model, $50 gets you a bare 2GB RAM board with no power or storage and you're still left with the bespoke ARM OS images and binaries to deal with. For the price of higher end models you can just get a complete standard x86 PC which happens to run better. That latter bit about the spec sheet is a bonus, not the main change. I.e. the target market shifted from "hot damn, I can run Linux at such a low price and wattage point while not worrying about support???" to "I want to spend my weekend tinkering with a Pi". The Pico 2 remains decent for the general market though. At $5 it's a well supported MCU with decent kit and a USB interface if you need to have that on a computer.
It'll also be interesting to see how much education even remains the mission now that they've IPOd. E.g., the mission statement on the investor relations page is:
> Raspberry Pi’s mission is to put high-performance, low-cost, general-purpose computing platforms in the hands of enthusiasts and engineers all over the world.
At the end of the day though, we could talk for days about how it must be one way or the other, but the only way to see what will actually happen is to wait 5-10 years. That reminds me, there is a regular HN "predictions for the next decade" kind of thread every turn of the decade and we're closer the next one rather than the last one already!
The differentiator for the Pi line was support for the capability at the price point, but the competition for the mainline Pis is no longer "random ARM boards with no driver updates", so no longer is that support actually the differentiator for the Pi either. With the lowest cost Pi 5 model, $50 gets you a bare 2GB RAM board with no power or storage and you're still left with the bespoke ARM OS images and binaries to deal with. For the price of higher end models you can just get a complete standard x86 PC which happens to run better. That latter bit about the spec sheet is a bonus, not the main change. I.e. the target market shifted from "hot damn, I can run Linux at such a low price and wattage point while not worrying about support???" to "I want to spend my weekend tinkering with a Pi". The Pico 2 remains decent for the general market though. At $5 it's a well supported MCU with decent kit and a USB interface if you need to have that on a computer.
It'll also be interesting to see how much education even remains the mission now that they've IPOd. E.g., the mission statement on the investor relations page is:
> Raspberry Pi’s mission is to put high-performance, low-cost, general-purpose computing platforms in the hands of enthusiasts and engineers all over the world.
At the end of the day though, we could talk for days about how it must be one way or the other, but the only way to see what will actually happen is to wait 5-10 years. That reminds me, there is a regular HN "predictions for the next decade" kind of thread every turn of the decade and we're closer the next one rather than the last one already!