a quick overview of where things are at
with raspberry pi right now i mean
you're nine years in
yeah so we're nine years in uh we've
sold about 42 million
um raspberry pi's
uh done a bit did about seven million
in the last year um so so kind of kind
of kind of quite high sales rates now um
about two years into raspberry pi 4 um
which is and raspberry pi 4 is kind of
like it's it's a it's the biggest step
change i'm i guess technically in um
raspberry i want to raspberry pi 2 was
probably that's a huge change because
you've gone from single core to quad
core but in terms of kind of user
experience really three plus three three
plus to four is the biggest jump that
i've seen so um that's going so that's
been really well received um by people
um we did compute module four so we kind
of finished the uh the pi four family
now so we have the pi itself and then
the compute module the cm4 variant that
we did last october um and then this in
this generation we've added a third form
factor which is the pi 400 so the pi and
the keyboard the kind of the kind of
consumer pc
um version of raspberry pi for um and
those are all going pretty well compute
module 4 is
has taken off a lot faster than previous
compute modules i think there's kind of
like a the feature set is really
um particularly i guess a couple of
things one is it has wireless you have
an option to have wireless on board so
you can you know you can just kind of
leave wireless to us and we take care of
it um and then the other one's the power
design so
um
previous compute modules you had to
provide them with sequence several power
rails yourself all of which were
sequenced properly coming up and coming
down um where this one you just put five
volts in and it makes its own rails um i
think those two things together have
made it have
made it much easier to work with and so
we're selling kind of tens of thousands
of cm4s a month um at a point where
with previous compute modules we
probably would have been doing hundreds
to thousands so it's really we're seeing
volume orders normally in your first
year we're still in our first year you
you'd just see um a kind of prototyping
orders but we're seeing volume orders
already so yeah it's it's it's busy yeah
yeah and you know on the compute module
side it's definitely the cm4 has
has caught my attention more than any
other
module uh type uh you know offering that
you know that i've seen previously so
it's
i'm imagining on your side it must be
even more visible than that because you
know for for
something that's sort of more
professionally uh oriented to start
catching the eyes of the of our
community it's uh
yeah that's it and so so you're kind of
seeing so we're seeing this kind of
faster than expected takeoff cm4 while
we're still seeing the ramp of cm3 and
cm3 plus and
so those are still
only now really starting to feed through
into volume that was cm
uh cm3
get my ears right cm3 plus was the tail
end of 2018 i think um and so we're a
little over two years into that and
that's kind of my normal kind of idea of
cadence for compute module wins so
that's ramping we've done as many
we did as many
compute modules in total across all the
families we did as many in the first
seven months of this year as we did in
the whole of last year so it's quite a
steep it's still only a real
a total business but it's a pretty steep
uh increase yeah yeah that's great yeah
plus silicon of course uh plus of course
rp that's the other thing i guess that's
that's going on uh pico continuing to do
really well uh seeing lots and lots and
lots of rp-2040 boards so third-party
boards built on our silicon
um
and uh we we've made an effort to get it
in with jlc pcb of course it's
everyone's favorite uh chinese um
turnkey pcb pcba shop uh so we got parts
in there we got parts out to our
approved reseller network so we kind of
did a lot of work to um
we obviously had before we launched we
spoke to uh uh spark phone adafruit
pimeroni and arduino and so you have the
kind of these kind of four
people we already have a really strong
relationship with but then after launch
we've kind of we've tried to even though
we're still in backlog on pico we've
been kind of diverting about 15 percent
of chip production um to uh to third
parties now that's working out pretty
well
and yeah i mean
at risk of uh of side tracking the
entire conversation
silicon conversation itself is
a huge thing for
what i mean like this that's that's i
mean it's a whole new thing
yes it's franchise two we call it
franchise two right because it is it is
a new thing where kind of everything
we've done we do lots of things um but
kind of everything we've done up until
then is kind of franchise one it's kind
of um it's it's the single board
computer and and all of the stuff around
us and new versions of single world
computer new form factors for the single
board computer accessories complements
documentation uh but it's all the same
thing basically and this is the first
thing we've done that isn't
franchise one yeah yeah and
i mean i don't know uh
i i i'd be curious to hear how you guys
speak about franchise 2 internally but
uh you know just from from from my
observations looking at at what
developed with the rp2040 with uh you
know with uh how many different
companies and third parties have jumped
on this um
it seems like this could end up
surpassing franchise one
i think you could maybe i think it could
i think it could i mean if you think the
microcontroller market it's a it's a
it's a 28 billion
unit a year
business it's an 18 billion dollar
business those two numbers are kind of
interesting right because they kind of
imply
that your average microcontroller only
costs 60 to 70 cents so you can really
see that that microcontroller business
is dominated by the ultra low end really
um but the interesting thing about p2040
is it is a it's a sub dollar it's a sub
dollar product um and it but it has this
kind of like uh it has quite a lot of
processing power quite a lot of memory
and it has some of this this kind of
flexible approach to to io um i think
for the middle it's never going to be a
a dust micro controller um uh i i know
i've
i believe if it may have read it in make
a like a profile of some of like the
cheapest microcontrollers you can buy
and you can buy a 10 microcontroller if
you only need a few tens of bytes of
of ram and a few hundred bytes of
program storage so it's never going to
be one of those and it's never going to
be one of these things at the other end
of the bell curve which is um
which has got cortex m7 these things
they call crossover microcontrollers
things are almost application processors
i have so much some of them even have a
class cores i mean i think
uh microchip do ones that have a5s in
them right so it's never going to be
those ends of the bell curve and of
course it's not a connected product so
it doesn't have a radio on it um but
there's an awful lot of stuff in the
middle of that bell curve which is just
decent amount of processing power
unconnected product used as some if it
needs to connect to the outside world
that uses some external product to do
that um i think it's a really
competitive product in that space um and
and they exist
that's the other thing of course this
year this year next year by the sounds
of it um they exist we will have
by the
end of next well by the middle of next
year we will produce
10 20 million of these and so kind of
people who want microcontrollers they
can get before 2023
may end up looking at it independently
of whether it i think it is a good
product but i think people will end up
looking at it independently of whether
it's a good product because it will
exist yeah so how have you guys managed
these chip shortages like what what are
you doing um
we were lucky that we came into the year
in a reasonable stock position
um we have so we're finished goods and
of and of chips um and we've spent this
year depleting those reserves um you
know we've been doing
um anywhere between six and eight
hundred thousand raspberry pi's a month
um this year so so
this year's really for us more in terms
of difficulty i think this year is
probably more of a story about um
demand
having more demand having more demand
than we were expecting rather than
having less supply we have about as much
supply as we were expecting but we have
to
eek that supply out to service probably
20 to 30 more demand um and this year
we'll do last year we did seven million
this year we'll do seven
seven and a half million if things go
well in the second half maybe seven and
a half million units but the really
galling thing is there was a nine
million unit yeah
there for us and that's what hurts is
that we won't get that next year i think
we'll be in uh we spent a lot of time
early this year making sure that we had
our ducks in a row for for 2022. so i
think 2022 actually shouldn't be too bad
for us in in franchise one okay that's
good to hear
and what was it that
led you guys to even start thinking
about doing a check
what did you see that you said hey
here's an opportunity or here's a need
uh i think uh what the the
microcontroller world um i think that
that was driven by uh just a
a dissatisfaction with what was out
there
dissatisfaction with what was out there
already i mean there's lots of cool
chips right um but
you know
not maybe not quite the right maybe
nothing nothing so exciting is to
motivate you to go and make a whole new
sort of product
uh and so it was it was great that the
team here were able to
to think of something
a little bit different
i was super super pleased with what
they've done
you know this is this is
um
this is amazing they're just an amazing
team of engineers here and and you know
they
they they like a challenge
did you have to i would imagine
something like this you need a certain
skill set for it so did you have to hire
for
getting into what is becoming franchise
two as you're putting it
um
yeah um there are
um
yeah there are specific there are
specific skill sets involved in asic
engineering which are very different
from the skill sets that are involved in
um
uh that are involved in um
software engineering or ward level
hardware engineering um uh and of course
um i mean uh
raspberry pi has always been very
actually very involved in in the chips
that are used in all of its products um
and um and so yeah there are some great
yeah cambridge is a great place to do
this they call it silicon silicon fan
you know uh it's like silicon silicon
valley but a lot flatter um and you know
they're always interesting people here
you want to work on interesting new
stuff yeah so part of that i mean this
is part of what i'm also surprised about
is uh
with
the
you know with with what i would imagine
would be
the hiring needed for this plus the
uh
the collaborations with
adafruit arduino and sparkfun and
pemeroni um
when
pico and the rp2040 came out it
was a complete surprise to everybody
like that and that must it must have
been under if you guys must have been
working on this for a long long time but
all of these things all of these things
take a long time right i mean that's the
big lesson of raspberry pi right is is
everything takes a long time you know
and and it's a lot of the long time just
not not just silicon software board
level stuff um a lot of it's driven by
the the desire to make um
uh a
um
make things that can be made at scale
there is a huge difference i think
between making things that could be made
at
um prototype scale or even at small
manufacture scale ten thousand unit
scale there's a huge difference between
ten thousand units gallon million unit
scale um in terms of how much attention
to detail you need to put into the up
front into the design because otherwise
you just drown in
in manufacturing issues or support
issues product quality issues um uh i
know it's been there sort of a lot a lot
of lessons over the years um in you know
if you if you if you cut corners uh you
you spend more time in the end um so all
these all these things all these things
take a long time
um and
uh but it's good i mean yeah the results
are the results are worthwhile you know
the results are worthwhile um and it's
always the case at raspberry pi that the
the things people can see
uh because the team grows
um the things that people can see that
are launched
were always done by a subset of the team
that exists um
and so so
very many of the people here are working
on things that will appear in the future
um
and um
you know something like raspberry pi 4
in terms of the hardware engineering for
us we buy before was the board level
hardware engineering for raspberry pi
for uh was only a very small handful of
people was only two or three people uh
quite quite a much larger software team
obviously but um yeah some of the
biggest runners have the smallest teams
uh compute module four was one person
wow
oh that's amazing
i wouldn't have guessed that yeah it's
kind of fun so start a guy called
dominic plunkett a fairly rece a fairly
recent uh joiner and it's his
first product for us i think
um
the fun one of course was simon martin
who was a um who joined us quite a long
time ago now and and worked on a number
of very long duration um projects that
all of a sudden then all kind of came to
fruition at once the two big ones being
high quality camera um last year and
then pi 400 uh they were both simon
martin products uh he'd done mouse and
keyboard mouse and keyboard obviously
which are kind of obviously a run-up to
pi 400 uh then hq camera then and they
all because of the way that because the
way the the time scales work they all
kind of end up bunched up together and
suddenly like every product we launched
is a simon martin product for about six
months
yeah that's uh
it's always funny for me to think about
things from the perspective of
publishing which you know is what i
spend my day-to-day doing and thinking
of an editor bringing in uh various
authors and they're working on things
and
you know lining up a series of pieces
all from one author and you know kind of
like the i mean martin type thing here
and then
another another editor with another
author coming in with another thing so
um i i don't understand how you guys
don't go mad you know because i've
always particularly people who work on
dailies or dailies or weeklies is just
it has to be done like you know next
tuesday's times of london hasn't been
written yet uh and yet it has to be
ready by the end of monday uh
and and i'd go insane i mean the nice
thing with at least in our businesses is
you know if your product isn't ready you
can you know unless you're
desperately short of money or something
if your product isn't ready you can just
wait until it is ready and then launch
it but not not that way in publishing
really
yeah well thankfully on my side we're
not a daily because i agree i would go
insane i don't think there'd be any
sleep
and there's always exactly the right
amount of news as well to fill and to
fill the daily and strange that it's not
odd you know there's never a little
extra news or never a little bit of
empty space it's always exactly the
right amount of uses it's very fortunate
yeah
so uh okay so transitioning from uh you
know i've got i've got a pico right here
uh with the you know the
the the nice packaging that uh
you guys set up but it's brilliant to
uh i love computers on a reel
we have them in the shop we have a reel
in the shop you come in i want two i
want two yards of computers please
really yeah i mean it's really it's
great uh but then uh you know there's a
there's a new thing here and uh you know
nobody's really seen this before but um
you know this is uh
this is this is pretty fancy and um
tell me about this
okay so that is a raspberry pi zero two
w
uh so it says zero two on the board but
it's zero two w um so it's a successor
to the zero w um which was itself the
successor to the zero so zero was our
was our five dollar raspberry pi and
zero is a fun product because um
uh you can sort of see
see i i still i still love zero more i
think than anything else we've ever done
um because
it's sort of us challenging ourselves to
keep being aggressive after we've had
some success um so so you can sort of
see
what raspberry pi has done is it's used
moore's law in a different way from the
way people normally use moore's law so
people normally pick a price point and
they use the declining specific cost of
computing
power
to fill that price point up with
progressively more
computing every year
and what raspberry pi 1 did was to say
well can we take a pc from 10 years ago
and then use moore's law to squash that
pc down to a much lower price point um
and we did that um and then we launched
raspberry pi 2 in 2015 so three years
later uh and lo and behold what do we do
we picked our price
uh 35
and we filled it up with a bunch of
computing um
and because that's what everyone always
tells you to do right that's what your
customers always say they want um and we
there was raspberry pi 2 was a great
product um but there was a little bit of
a feeling after we launched it that we'd
kind of fallen into this trap
of being very conventional again and
then zero is the output of then saying
well can we um uh can we uh um challenge
ourselves again um to to to
um to squeeze up um
the same performance and into lower into
a low cost structure so your 35 dollar
raspberry pi one gets stripped down in a
variety of ways and repackaged as a five
dollar computer
then zero w comes along about uh about
18 months later um and that was very
popular and of course now it's the most
popular zero product so about ninety
percent of zero that's ten dollars
yeah it's a lot of fun for five for five
extra bucks right so ninety percent of
zeros that sell uh are are zero w's um
but still people ask for more
performance and zero is a raspberry pi
one right so compared to a raspberry pi
four it's got about a forty if the
performance of a raspberry pi uh of a
raspberry pi 4. um and um there are
things you can't do with it um and so
people ask us well can we have another
zero and the because the problem we have
with zero is that it's very dependent
the design is very dependent on that soc
that we use the 2835 soc that we use
which is a um a pop
it has a pop package so you have the the
soc and then you have the dram stacked
on top of it
and we don't have any other pop chips so
if you look at a raspberry pi 2
raspberry pi 3 3 plus 4 um they all have
external memory so they all have memory
which is mounted on the pcb there's no
room on that pcb if you want to suddenly
if you want to stay single sided or
really actually i think even a
double-sided design would be quite
challenging
to achieve
so we kind of backed into a corner
and so it took us a long time to figure
out how to get out of that corner and um
zero zero twos the zero two is the
product which is enabled by rp3
a0 which you'll see is written on top of
the chip
uh which is um
that's a
that's a that's that's not silicon
innovation that's packaging innovation
so effectively what that is is that's a
bcm
2710a1 die so the same chip that's used
in raspberry pi 3 the same piece of
silicon that's used in raspberry pi 3
put inside a package
with
some lpdd and lpddr2 memory die
to make a finished object
uh and then on the outside it has a logo
an rp3
um and that's what it is so you could
sort of see what you're what you're
holding as being kind of a
slightly down clocked it's a one
gigahertz versus 1.2 gigahertz slightly
down clocked raspberry pi 3 with half as
much memory and a smaller and a smaller
um
uh uh not not the same set of um
accessories around it on the board uh
and it's 15 bucks so we have actually
had to grow the price in order to do
that but it's about 10 times the
performance of a for a multi-threaded
benchmark it's about 10 times the
performance of a zero
pi 3 was where people started looking at
raspberry pi as not just maybe an
educational product but something that
could do serious
work you could turn this into a
potentially
a desktop device that you
that you use daily and yes to go from
from that to you know to to this size
is
at for 15 bucks yes
yes
yeah it's a lot it's a lot of fun right
so
for me kind of raspberry pi 3 is the
first raspbian part yeah we've always
called ourselves a pc company we've
always aspired to be a pc company
probably the one that which becomes and
they've always been viable pcs for some
subset of the things people do with pcs
um raspberry pi 3 if if perhaps
raspberry pi 4 is the one that finally
delivers
uh on
uh yeah for all but the the most
hardcore of users um it's a pc so you
can run a web browser on it um very very
comfortably raspberry pi 3 is probably
the one that delivers the same thing but
without the web browser so pretty much
anything else that you want to do as
long as it isn't run that one horrible
memory hungry processor hungry
application um pretty much anything else
you want to do you can do a raspberry pi
3 and that's why it's exciting to bring
that level of performance to the zero
family yeah absolutely uh so and so
you're you're saying here so this just
to just to
look at it closely um here's the zero
two w
this is the original zero uh non-w
yes indeed
and so looking at them side by side here
you can see this is the uh the with the
rp
380 a0 yes that's right that's this guy
right here
and that's what we call as that's what
we call a sip
so it's a system in package
um so it's this multiple silicon die
stacked and or sometimes stacked in
package yeah okay
and then uh and then one of the big
differences that i'm seeing here we've
got uh uh on this one this is this is
the original chip here that we're seeing
is a stacked design yeah so that's
actually two chips so what you see what
you see there is two packets so if you
sort of i'm not sure if you turn it on
its side you might be able to see it's a
little bit hard to see there are
actually two
it's a little sandwich there are two
layers they are slightly different
colors um so there's a top package which
has got elpeda i think written on it
which is effectively micron um and then
you've got the bottom p underneath is
the bottom package which is the
processor package the bcm 2835 package
and so those when you're assembling that
those are two separate pick and place
steps um and it's actually a slightly
specialized pop is a slightly
specialized assembly step in that um
when you only have a single layer of
components what you can do is screen
print solder um solder paste onto the
board obviously the question is how do
you get solder paste onto the top uh of
the the package so you you pick and
place that onto the board how do you get
solar plates on top the answer is you
take the top package you pick it up and
you have a little tray
with solder paste in this little round
tray with solder paste in of a very
finely calibrated depth and then your
you dip
it in a little solder paste adheres to
each of the balls
on the bottom of the top package and
then you put it down and there's a
little um the uh there's a little kind
of um
arm that goes across the uh uh the
radially across the this disc and every
time you do a dip the thing rotates
through 360 degrees and the little arm
smooths the solder paste down to this
very finely defined depth
um so so there's there's some subtlety
there there's not much subtlety in the
packaging design it's just two chips um
uh the bottom package obviously has pads
on top of it which is a bit unusual um
uh but then there's some subtlety in the
pick and place what we've done really
here is we've moved the subtlety into
the packaging so you now have to die
inside one package yeah got it
and so one of the things that i thought
was interesting so again back to the
to the pico uh
when you launched this a few months back
uh
one of the things that really caught
everyone's attention was putting the
state machines the pio uh functionality
into it uh something that
most people really weren't familiar with
uh we're excited to see especially
uh in something this size and also at a
four dollar price point uh
uh it was just is pretty amazing but uh
you know so this when this showed up and
uh and i really got to see it and take a
good look at the uh
zero two w uh you know the first thing
that popped in my head is what kind of
surprises does this have baked into it
are there any any uh any other element
the surprises there's no surprises right
um the surprise is that is bcm 2710a1 in
there that really is so that's i think
it's an important surprise it sounds it
sounds uh it's mundane really um but it
is a raspberry pi yeah it runs all the
raspberry pi software the software it is
almost indistinguishable uh to the
system software um from
um uh from a raspberry pi 3. um and so
so yeah upsides are downsides um you
know upside total software compatibility
which is something we care about
enormously uh downsides yo i wasn't able
to squeeze a pio pio state machines into
the gpi subsystem there is no analog
input there is no pio um you know no
there's no there's none of that fancy
stuff there's no real time uh there's
some other cool real time stuff that uh
that the pico that pico has in it um i
guess the other thing you'll notice when
you look at it is there's a can over the
wireless
yeah there's a silver can over the
wireless and i think this is probably
this reflects our another aspect of of
our evolution um since um
uh 2016 so raspberry pi 3 was the first
product that we shipped in in 2016 with
wireless um and we've evolved um to uh
uh from putting wireless on the hey we
put wireless on the board and what you
realize is you put wireless on the board
and then if someone wants to take your
product and integrate it into another
product they have to basically
with some other circuitry um they have
to basically start from scratch
particularly in in in fcc from in north
america
i have to start from scratch uh and
completely reconform that product i do a
complete conformance run
one of the reasons why people use wi-fi
modules you can go and buy a murata
wi-fi module or something one of the
reasons why people use wi-fi modules is
that they hide that from you um so you
can just treat them as a
as a modular component and you only need
to worry about the unintentional
radiation and susceptibility of the rest
of your design and you just say andrew
and that box does radio and that's
nothing to do with me and the function
of the can is actually not to um hide
the uh the outside world from emissions
from the radio is to hide the radio from
interference from the outside world so
that you can so that you can make that
modular claim that what what happens
inside this box is unaffected by what
other changes i've made in the system
now the fun thing about raspberry pi 3
plus and raspberry pi 4 and raspberry
compute module
is that they are all
modular products so they all have cans
over their wi-fi so from an fcc
perspective all of our products post
raspberry pi 3 plus are fcc radio
modules
uh like but they also do other things
like have a whole computer on them um
but but they have the same integration
rules um and so that was the thing where
you do get people integrating zero w
into products but they have to do as
with raspberry pi 3 they have to do uh
more work um more expensive work at the
fcc level and so the aspiration with
this product was well look let's as we
do with everything now let's make it a
radio module and then it's very easy to
integrate
so
have you been
uh have you been surprised at the waze
so speaking of these integrations and
obviously you're you're
you're accommodating uh the
people using raspberry pi
in uh you know
commercial grade products by especially
by having the compute module line but
thinking back to 2012 when you know the
first pie came out versus what the way
that they've been adopted by uh by
everyone uh you know what
are you surprised yeah we are surprised
and and we and it happened very early on
i think you can sort of see the story
for us through pie is like we we had
these educational aspirations but if you
look at the people who bought them in
2012 they weren't kids uh and they
weren't perfect they weren't
engineering companies they were
hobbyists enthusiasts you know your your
readers right um but the interesting
thing about that demographic is a lot of
them are educators um and a lot of them
are professional engineers and so kind
of like it's been the root of the tree
for raspberry pi that by because we were
popular with those guys those are the
people who took us into schools those
are the people who took us into their
workplace and when their boss said hey
go build me a thing they're like hey i i
know how to do this
exactly the same story with arduino
right i mean it's exactly the way that
the kind of
has arduino has
been successful and that's been one of
the great things about this year is is
having ability to kind of work really
really really closely with arduino on
the uh on the the 2040 based uh products
um so so yeah it's surprising and last
year seven million raspberry pi's well
over half of those were into industrial
applications um and uh yeah and that's
that's ranging from big giant companies
um to this make a pro world um that we
we've always been interested in
i guess that we're investing a lot of
effort this year and trying to sustain
was back to franchise 2. um
we've been targeting what rpg what spare
rp2040s we have outside of our own needs
and the four
close in guys
really to kind of like make a prototype
businesses who can't make anything this
year right you know um so so there's
kind of
it's
it's an interesting mix it's interesting
volumix you know we have hundred
thousand unit customers um and we have a
handful of those we probably have fewer
than ten people who are buying a hundred
thousand units
offers a year um but then we'll have
thousands that are buying a thousand
um our office office yeah so it's very
very broad very broad base yeah yeah
so do you imagine uh with a with a new
zero uh you know what does this slot in
what you see
um
it's so it's a um
with the can it's designed to be it's
designed to be integrated um i i think a
uh
probably one observation has been that
when we talk about you know we we sold
um
something like half a million compute
modules last year but we did about four
million industrial units so so seven
eighths of our industrial business was
sbcs
not songs right um and i guess we've
learned that people are very keen and
people go a long way to avoid making a
baseboard um yeah
lots of we talk about the internet of
big things um that there are there are
lots of objects people think about the
internet of things they think about um
thermostats and light switches and stuff
but actually a lot of the things that
people connect these days are air
conditioners hvac units and and big
pieces of factory equipment um and those
objects actually an spc may well be the
right platform um for that um because
you don't have to cut a baseboard you
basically have a have a hat or or just a
wiring loom sometimes you just have
wires going down onto soldered down onto
onto a board um so what we think you
know zero
um zero two w is going to be a
a platform for those kinda on the
industrial side it's a platform for
those kind of applications where people
want uh you know they want a kind of
more performance than they get from xero
they don't need the peripheral sets the
wide ethernet big usb multi multi usb
ports that you get from a three or a
three plus they don't need the
performance of a four
um
and they want a lower cost point and
they want a more integrable
um
something something they can integrate
into a smaller into a smaller space and
it's probably our smallest integral
integra measured by board area it's
probably fractionally smaller than cm4
and cm3 and so it's probably about our
smallest integrable easily integrable
product
how do you guys decide which boards to
make you know so you know you're talking
about dominic and simon but what you
know what's what's that what's that
decision tree like oh yeah this is a
simon product by the way
um actually both the sip and the board
itself are assignment products and so
you talk about like what sorts of people
do you need actually people who do lots
of stuff
and simon simon's probably uh at one
extreme in terms of his ability to do
lots of things um
so uh how do we decide what to make uh
we make the things we want
so i and that's weird well it's another
thing the sun's flipping but um it's um
there's a sort of a traditional
marketing way of deciding what products
to make um and it is
um
i don't like it
um because you you go and you speak to
customers and you ask them what they
want um and i know of course we listen
to our customers but um it's important
to not over emphasize what customers
want because otherwise what you can do
is you can sort of start to kind of look
at all the customers and say well these
people want this thing these people want
this thing and i'll make a product and
these people on this thing if i make a
product which is like this i can cover
all of those
sets of
functionality with with one product
that's great i'll do that and what you
end up doing is you can make a product
which is kind of in the middle which
interpolates between the needs of a
bunch of different people and actually
he pleases nobody uh you know you either
make a thing which doesn't have the
function it doesn't actually have the
functionality people want or you end up
making a thing which has loads of stuff
passed on to one design so it's
expensive so everyone's sad because
they're paying for functionality they
don't need
the nice thing about making products
that you um that you want is it
guarantees at least one person wants the
thing that you have made um
and um i think the other fruit company
there's a there's a theory about the
other fruit company right um that they
in their classic in their classic era
they basically made what steve wanted
yeah um
and it turned out a lot of people wanted
what steve wanted um and so they were
successful um and so i think you know
we're geeky engineers and we we want
particular things we make those things
and hey a lot of other geeky engineers
like the same stuff that we that we like
so that's that's how that's literally
how we do it
you know so it's funny that you bring up
apple uh because it's hard to not start
to see some uh you know some some
similarities uh in the in the journeys
that you guys are going on but um do you
how do how do you
how do you look at that at what they've
done and think about you know where
raspberry pi is now
um well obviously they're an amazing
company and i'm i'm i'm using a piece of
their equipment to talk to you to talk
to you right now
and they they do they do great stuff and
they they have a they have a very
admirable sensibility in terms of in
terms of engineering you know they they
are very very good at engineering um and
um i think probably the
call out one similarity is this kind of
full stack
approach um that obviously they yeah
they have now famously a full stack
approach that goes all the way through
to very very very advanced m1 um very
very very advanced um uh semiconductors
uh all the way up to product design that
kind of worrying about that's kind of
nand we call it nan to tetris sometimes
you know they think there is a course
something called manta tetras which
tries to teach you a little bit about
everything that's in the stack between a
nand gate and writing tetris and
javascript um and and you know being
able to worry about
um
uh the nand gates on the chips and
um
the
uh and the color of the icons on the
desktop um is a wonderful experience uh
one that i very much enjoyed um i think
what you find is raspberry pi tends to
do these things somewhat some sometimes
a little bit more through partnership
rather than uh
the kind of brute force approach that
you can take if you if you're a trillion
dollar company um so yeah raspberry pi
has a year works with partners to do
these things you know the the silicon
you know the there are two pieces of
silicon in that sip
on that on that board and they come from
two different partners um with your
raspberry pi so that's obviously an
incredible relationship um
and then raspberry pi is kind of
bringing to the table the thing that
it's best at and often the thing it's
best at is good engineering but also
having relationships with people um and
so that's that that sip is the product
of uh two relationships and a good
engineer um
and so so being a you can do you can do
the full stack thing several ways and i
think we are finding interesting new
ways
to do that
um yeah
nice
uh
i i am curious um next year will be 10
years
for raspberries
and of course wonderful wonderfully it
can't quite be ten years because we
launched on the 29th of february so it
can it can never be quite detailed yes
it can be eight years or twelve years
but it can never quite be ten but we i
think we're going to declare it i think
we have thought about this and we're
going to declare it on the 28th um uh
which is which is
just which is quite nice so that's so we
decided to round down rather than
rounding up okay
so you know one of the things as i was
thinking about that i thought you know
10 years tends to be a number of
significance for for everyone you know a
decade it's it's it's a big thing but
when you talk about you know the
the the second part of the raspberry pi
name being
uh mathematical content that is you know
it's its own thing uh i don't know if if
10 years really has that same
significance or if you know if you're
thinking about that
i i mean i would i would love to have a
product announcement for for 10 for 10
years and i'm not going to
um and that's sad i mean i could i i
wanted it badly enough i almost
suggested we slip that one
um to to to be uh but it would have been
synthetic actually we we we never we try
never to be synthetic in that way um so
we you know we launch as soon as we can
we launched as soon as we got some um
and
uh so so yeah um i don't know what it's
gonna feel like because it was a very
strange day launch day was a very
a very odd day you mentioned pie of
course we we didn't really ship any
product for the first couple of weeks
and if we delayed exactly two weeks then
of course we could have we could have
announced on pi day
um so so maybe that was a missed maybe
that was a missed opportunity um
uh but it's gonna be it's gonna be
strange launch day you know obviously
knocking over our partners websites um
doing a hundred thousand we sold a
hundred thousand raspberry pies on the
day um and then spent six months making
the raspberry pies to sell to the first
i remember the partners sending out
t-shirts
about after about three months they
started sending out t-shirts to all the
people who'd ordered them to say hang on
look
guys we're doing our best you know and
even though there was then you know by
that point there was enough volume
though tens of thousands of units there
was enough volume that people were they
were showing up on twitter he was still
only at a point where people who had
ordered before 11am uh which is
basically no americans because no one
was awake um uh um people had ordered
before 11am uk time had got them it was
still quite wearing for people who'd
ordered them at two in the afternoon or
who got up first thing in california and
ordered them and that was 5 p.m in uk
time
um so i don't know what it's gonna feel
like having an actual solid decade under
under our belt it's still fun right
that's the thing it's fun and if it
wasn't fun i'd stop doing it and i'm
kind of amazed because i have no real
patience for anything um and i've never
done anything for more than four years
um and to have a thing that i've done
continuously for a decade
is is and of course that we were doing
for several years before we launched um
is it just seems
outrageous
really yeah it's i it's significant yeah
yeah
there'll be some champagne i mean
there'll be a party um there'll be a
party and there'll be champagne uh but
but sadly there won't be a raspberry pi
five so
we'll be looking for it and whenever it
does come out because everybody you know
it's one of the one of the great things
is just how much enthusiasm and
excitement uh the community has for
anything that you guys are putting out
and i think
uh it's just a testament to what good
work you've been doing for the most part
and it's a testament to that there was
this community there i mean i was like
what's the surprise of the raspberry pi
that surprises though is that there was
a community there waiting and there was
demand waiting i mean people talk about
category defining products and i mean
the ipad's of course a great example of
a category defining product that you
can't it's the other good thing about
the this weird approach to marketing
which is
you you couldn't have focus grouped the
ipad into existence
um because you you can't go out and ask
people if they want a product that
doesn't exist yet they all you can just
make it and then and see if people go
for it um and raspberry pi is like that
right we we made it um and sometimes you
drop a throat just throw a dart
and you hit a
a pool of demand you hit a kind of a
place where there was a lot of demand
latent demand sat there uh and nobody
knew about it because there was no
products there tapping it um and then
you throw your dart and your dart hits
the public demand and bang 100 000 units
um and of course you know this maker
community i mean the community that's
around i'm going to make a fair in um
in
my first maker faire in new york in um
the autumn of 2011 with a raspberry pi
prototype and a monitor and i got a
trestle table um and we just ended up
running quake 3 which is one of the
things that it could do very well um and
this just this crowd of people gathered
around but the the
the next to us the trestle table next to
us was this kid who had an arduino and
he'd automated a uh a doll's house
lights light switches in the doll's
house and that was the first time that i
really felt that we would
that there was a community out there
waiting for it that there was that there
were people that it might and also on
the educational side that it might work
that they were not just a community but
community of children who wanted this um
and so it's it's yeah it's been it's
been a while right 10 years
yeah and it's at least another 10 years
of fun i think maybe maybe i'll just
wake up one day and it won't be fun
anymore i'll stop and do something else
but but
i can sort of see
i mean it's very hard to see more than
10 years in our industry at the moment
because because there's a lot of
um discontinuous particularly the end of
moore's law a lot of discontinuous
change going on um but i can sort of see
a decade i mean i can see 2030 from here
um and
and that's that's kind of fun