Raspberry Pi IPO

[SiliconWizard]

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-ipo/

Is that good news? What do you think?

[brucehoult]

Separating the for-profit and charity operations is a good thing, and this makes it more clear.

The dev board landscape has vastly improved since R Pi started, and they no doubt were instrumental in pushing that in the early years, at least in pricing (since eclipsed by Chinese companies) and documentation / examples / educational materials etc (still the leader there).  Sadly their boards are not actually very open source or documented at the bootstrap level.

The RP2040 is by far their most innovative product. The original Pi Zero the worst, especially in pretending it was $5, which was never a real price (the Pi Zero 2 seems to be realistically priced).

The Chinese companies are less transparent about subsidies they have -- they probably break even (or better) on a unit basis, but their NRE is surely never recovered unless they're selling many millions of them to the government for use in surveillance systems (which given they always in the last decade have NPUs seems likely).

I wouldn't invest ... and let's see what happens with prices.

[SiliconWizard]

Hard to tell, indeed, what's gonna happen, so certainly a bit too early to invest. Also assuming you like the direction they take.

They do "deserve" it for sure, but it's a double-edged sword. I'm afraid prices will inevitably tend to go up, and they are likely to focus on hype stuff such as AI everything.

Yes the RP2040 was pretty innovative, and rather unique. You probably know that it was actually designed *after* the RP1 (sure, it's the RP2), the IO chip in the RPi5, which contains a similar PIO - it was initially designed for the RP1. I think the RP2 project came later as some kind of "why not" thing, reusing a number of blocks in the RP1, and it worked.

But precisely, I'm absolutely not sure they'll have the opportunity to lead a similar project under the pressure of shareholders.

[ataradov]

This is bad, IMO. Non-profit stuff will start to get less attention and eventually will be closed, resulting in one more shareholder-driven rent-seeking enterprise.

[thermistor-guy]

Raspberry Pi Holdings, price quote:
 https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/RPI.LN/overview