The Raspberry Pi microcomputer prides itself on being affordable, with its tiny $35 price-tag for the original Model B Pi. But now its lowest cost board — the $25 Model A — has gone on sale in the U.S. The Raspberry Pi Foundation confirmed to TechCrunch that Model A can now be purchased in the U.S. via reseller Allied Electronics (http://www.alliedelec.com/lp/130124rasomodela/) (which currently appears to have 70 units in stock).
What does $25 buy you? Enough processing power to use it to run a home media centre if you so desire, according to the Foundation. But the Model A was conceived with lower power consumption projects in mind, perhaps battery or solar powered, as Model A consumes around a third less power than Model B. It also has half the RAM of the second revision Model B (http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/15/raspberry-pi-mini-computer-now-shipping-with-ram-upgraded-to-512mb-from-256mb-same-tiny-35-price-tag/), plus only one USB port and no Ethernet connection — to keep costs down.
Model A sales kicked off in Europe (http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/04/25-model-a-raspberry-pi-on-sale-in-europe/) in early February, with Asia (http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/26/pi-model-a-asia/) coming on stream last week. Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi founder, said today that sales of the Model A Pi have been amounting to "a few thousand a week" thus far.
"We burned through the first 20,000 units quite quickly, and are building a few thousand a week at the moment, but we don't have good visibility of sell through yet," he told TechCrunch when asked about early sales data, adding: "I'd expect us to dip in and out of availability for the next month or so until we reach a steady state."
The Foundation passed one million Model B sales (http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/12/one-million-raspberry-pi-have-been-sold-since-launch/) in January, less than a year after it launched the Pi in March 2012. The microcomputer was conceived as a tool to get kids learning to code (http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/14/raspberry-pi-the-small-computer-with-the-big-ambition-to-get-kids-coding-again/) – but has also proved popular with the maker community (http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/20/the-raspberry-pi-dynamic-headlight-can-tell-you-how-fast-youre-cycling/) to power all manner of DIY gizmos and gadgets.
Via: TechCrunch