[alberth]

Raspberry Pi as a company does ~$325M in annual revenue.

But I can’t understand what are the use cases to be selling 73M units.

Would anyone mind sharing what are the broadly applicable use cases, because selling 73M units is well beyond hobbyist fun.

https://investors.raspberrypi.com/

[scottydelta]

Well, there are a lot of products being made and sold using Raspberry Pi. I have seen people use it to make interactive content on screens at escape rooms, and use it as a computer for digital signage that shows the same content on a loop.

6 months ago, I also started experimenting with Raspberry Pi, and now I am working on a Chromecast alternative for businesses called Soljacast using RPi. My device can work as digital signage, or a casting device for co-workings and event companies that use computers at events for presentations.

I am also using it to build a personal companion AI device with a screen, sort of like an Amazon Echo Show but with Microsoft's Clippy in there. So I am sure people are building even more complex stuff than me.

Here is a video of how my device is being used at a local exhibition venue: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FF3I9EOs4AA

[justin66]

They’ve been selling much more to industrial customers than hobbyists for the better part of a decade.

[geerlingguy]

Consider that entire product lines for random widgets you see in every day life in the dozens or hundreds have Pis inside now. A lot of "smart" things are just the thing plus a Compute Module.

There are smart parking garage lights, smart inspection cameras, smart golf ball dispensers... all these things have enough margin they can absorb a 100-300% component increase, though I'm sure they don't like it.

[harrall]

Very few commercial and industrial products use a Pi though.

Pi - 73 million sold

ESP32 - 1 billion sold

STM32 - 13 billion sold

For every 1 Pi sold, there’s almost 200 STM32s sold.

[jkrejcha]

Pis/other SBCs and ESPs/STMs/etc are effectively a different subclass of embedded

Firstly, Pis and SBCs like it tend to be fully functional OOBE on their own. This has useful properties but also means that hooking them up and testing their use is a little bit simpler even compared to a microcontroller dev board

Secondly, it's a full Linux ecosystem and all of that that it entails. This ecosystem has more in it than these ecosystems (especially in the FOSS world) and it's also useful for projects that exceed a few MB of RAM. Sure if I want to do a few things a microcontroller like this is a very very good and probably the better option (it isn't that difficult to write a lil C to control these things) but SBCs can do lot more than that while still keeping many of the advantages, which may be the difference in some cases

[echoangle]

The next point under your quoted sales figure:

25% Enthusiasts and education 75% Industrial and embedded

[oehtXRwMkIs]

off the top of my head: ip kvms, keyboards, 3d printers, home assistant, cameras, zwave or zigbee. Their moat is superb software support and established ecosystem. I think their most challenging competition would be ESP32s or mini pcs. Source: my ahh