Wow I was curious and it looks like there were only ever about 5-6 million Apple II computers produced (according to Wikipedia). That's pretty darn amazing that the Pi is already on track to surpass the Apple II--what I remember as the most ubiquitous and well loved computer for learning when I grew up in the 80's.
I think it's officially time for anyone who doubted the Pi to eat crow. I know I jumped on the bandwagon and never thought it would be worthwhile. Now I own a couple of them and love them!
And there's your answer as to how the Pi can surpass the Apple II. The Pi is so cheap that people can easily own two or three. Do you think many people owned more than one Apple II? :-)
My dad (an experimental physicist) still has ~10 of them in his lab.
(They run the code that directly controls his apparatus -- it was written in the 80s, and with them being so plentiful in university surplus there was never a reason to change platforms. Plus, the code itself is some combination of assembly and BASIC, which would probably be kind of a pain to port!)
I remain skeptical that all 5 million units are in daily use.
A healthy fraction are probably in serious use by skilled embedded developers and a certain range of users like XBMC fans. Another serious fraction are probably using them for the actual educational purposes of the system.
But I fear that the majority are sitting in desk drawers, booted once and tried and then left to gather dust. I compare them to treadmills. Some buy them and use them religiously but most buy them with great intentions and leave it at that.
You've been downvoted pretty heavily, but I think you're right. Both of mine are sitting in a drawer.
The fanless server I have under my desk has the equivalent storage, processing power, and bandwidth of dozens of Raspberry Pis. Any software I can put on my Pi, I can even more easily put on my server (which is also more reliable than a Pi, in my experience).
Pis running Linux also aren't nearly realtime enough to use for a lot of low-level embedded tasks, so I still use bare-metal AVR or ARM hardware for most hardware projects.
Mostly due to the lack of SATA and gigabit ethernet, the Pi is just really not that useful for me.
Kind of does matter when we're comparing the relative success of the two devices.
We know about the ecosystem that sprung up from the Apple ][ because we have history to look back upon. All the firms that sold software (I still miss Beagle Bros). All the magazines. All the books. All the accessories.
I just don't see that same ecosystem surrounding the RPi, especially if 5 million users are involved. A couple of heavily trafficked forums don't really seem like the same thing.
And given the Apple ]['s price ($1,200 in 1978 dollars or $4,700 in today's money), they were probably not as quickly tossed aside once interest waned. This was a serious a purchase as a used car.
I think the success is correlated in the markets that they are driving though. RPi wasn't the first microcomputing board (Arduino was introduced 2005) but it definitely popularized them. Now you have intel Edison and a bazillion other tiny computers springing up.
It's easy to be skeptical now but I think 10 years from now it will be easier to compare Apple IIe to RPi (good or bad).
If the RPi creates a wave of kids enthralled with embedded systems and Linux system development, I'm certainly for it.
But, from my viewpoint as an embedded systems developer, I fear that those are greatly steeper learning curves than how the Apple generation (myself included) got started:
I own an original Raspberry Pi model B (still running 24/7 in a project) for which I was on the pre-order from one of the first few batches (I think I just missed out on the first 10,000 or so), I eventually purchased an upgraded model B with 512MB ram and then I instantly purchased the Pi 2.
Very useful things, and the progress made is wonderful.
Call me ignorant, but what is the point of this thing? Couldn't you just learn to program on a normal PC like most people have instead of buying something smaller, or are the potential uses for this thing really as limitless as I'm lead to believe?
You could, but a normal PC would run you more than $50, and would require driver overhead, bios setup, etc. and would probably be overkill for small projects.
The purpose of the Pi was to make an small, inexpensive educational board that "just works". The hardware standard makes it easy to flash other instances onto the Pi, and the form factor makes it easier to use with something you couldn't put a PC box next to.
I find it quite lovely its CPU is a direct descendant of the one that powered the Acorn Archimedes, which, in turn, was inspired by the 6502 that powered the BBC Micro, the Apple II, the 8-bit Atari family, the PET, the VIC-20, the C-64 and so many others.
The Pi stands on the shoulders of a giant on top of a pyramid of giants.
I'm using a couple right now to demo using IBM Watson services in real world (physical/IoT) applications - you can expect a blog post on that in a few weeks. (I work on the Watson team at IBM)
I also have one set up as an XBMC media center for streaming netflix and such.
- Longterm support (former models still being sold)
- 100% backwards compatibility (RPi1/2)
- fully open source stack including GPU driver
Broadcom's VideoCoreIV driver has been open sourced by Broadcom making the RPi well suited for future developments like Mir and Wayland. In contrast, the Banana Pi has a Mali GPU without a proper open source driver (lima development seems currently halted).
I think it's officially time for anyone who doubted the Pi to eat crow. I know I jumped on the bandwagon and never thought it would be worthwhile. Now I own a couple of them and love them!