Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge
bbc.com
bbc.com
If you had a physical place where you could source sticker-price raspberry pis it would already be quit good.
A store itself should be an “experience”. You go in, play with products, be inspired and get an appetite for them.
Sure you may leave the store empty handed — just like 99% of people that walk into an Apple store. But if the store convinces you that you want... no _need_ their product, you can then buy later from their online store.
People and businesses really need to think of all sales and PR channels of a business as a whole, not a subset of each part. Only then will we see initiatives like this Pi store start to revive the high street.
This doesn't work for RPi if they want to sell at the online rate, unless they have huge positive conversion on add-ons and up-sells.
I presume the people running the store have calculated these prospective rates and have determined them to be likely enough to open the store, but time will tell.
I wish them all the luck in the world!
It's 32£, which is less than on amazon.co.uk (currently 33.95£, varying between 33 and 36 over the last month). I'm guessing it's pretty good.
You can occasionnally find them for less on chinese websites, but I haven't seen a deal in a while, and you need to wait at least 3 weeks to get one; which is pretty much the opposite of brick-and-mortar store.
Not really convinced the design and branding of the store matches up well with the realities of their actual product.
This shop could be more for luring new users and making it look simple for a first approach.
The RPi has always been about the "technically sweet", not about maximum penetration into new markets.
DR. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: "If the development by the enemy as well as by us of thermonuclear weapons could have been averted, I think we would be in a somewhat safer world today than we are...I do not think we want to argue technical questions here, and I do not think it is very meaningful for me to speculate as to how we would have responded had the technical picture at that time been more as it was later. However, it is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it; there were some debates about what to do with it after it was made. I cannot very well imagine if we had known in late 1949 what we got to know by early 1951 that the tone of our report would have been the same."
Setting aside the association of this phrase with the development of terrifying weapons, I think it is apt for the Raspberry Pi. The has lowered the barrier for entry to so many projects that you can just go ahead and make things rather than worrying about whether the utility of the thing is worth its cost or risk. Certainly Pi projects seem to be proliferating in my house...
Doesn't really look like an Apple Store either, unless wood and white is now reserved for Apple...
Element14 isn't exactly the most friendly website for a lay person...
Companies should be very careful not to alienate their core audience that made them big. In the past, lots of companies in their plans to widen their audiences made this mistake.
I do not claim that. But it is a strong sign of the direction that the Raspberry Pi Foundation might want to target in the future. And this direction has a potential to alienate the core audience.
Us "nerds" are just never happy.
Agreed, the other key component though is actually making their machine and software/hardware approachable, smooth, performant and reliable. Which they haven't really put any effort in to since they started.
I really wanted the dream of an affordable computer for kids to be a reality but at the end of the day when the $35 just isn't as performant as a budget tablet around the same price then kids are going to just end up with tablets and never have the opportunity to crack the machine open.
If the product doesn't live up to the sales pitch of the store, then the product is just going to get returned.
How many kids got a PC to play games on but while bored found QBasic and Gorillas.bas.
How many kids on MySpace or NeoPets learnt HTML/CSS as a way to customize their profiles.
This all used to be a reality when kids grew up using a general purpose computing platform, now the choices are a Tablet that works as a general purpose platform you can't tinker with or a board you can only tinker on but not use as a computer.
For the children that love to tinker, $€35 will probably not be an obstacle. Tablets and RPis appeal to quite different audiences.
That being said, you can power a Pi by attaching the right cables to the GPIO headers:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/954 https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruits-raspberry-pi-lesson-5-u...
Booting from USB required a hardware change, and appears to be available in the latest versions of the Pi:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
(Admittedly, it looks like you need a microSD card to boot the Pi so you can reconfigure it this way.)
The non-nerdy masses aren’t interested, they’re happily consuming content on iOS or Android, or doing work on Windows/MacOS
unless wood and white is now
reserved for Apple...
Also a lab/work bench where anyone can plug and play different components together and experiments, measure voltage, signals with an USB oscilloscopes (make with PI? ).
Volunteers can come in regularly to demo, share info, organizer classes.
Instead of just shelf full of the products - it should also have area where it run a lot of the interesting projects found on the web AI object recognition with YOLO2|3, PI self driving car, etc
Offering taster classes and workshops to get people interested in the product could be a great use of the space.
Apple branding, stores and USP all kind of complement each other in that minimalist 'just works' feel. Raspi isn't that.
Here is a contemporaneous example where the focus is very much on education
Maplin was a great shop and open on the weekends was often a lifesaver.
I think charging x10 what a product would cost on eBay is reasonable. But often you’d be charged x100 to x1000 times more for cheap components (resistors etc.). I mostly ended up buying larger packs of parts which might come in handy, because I didn’t want to be overcharged to that degree.
I wouldn’t mind so much if they stocked good quality soldering irons (e.g. Hakko) or good quality hand tools. But they didn’t.
It’s a shame there are no good electronics high street shops left, but I’m not particularly sad to see Maplin go personally.
I suppose it would have to do if you're in a pinch, but there's a reason walk-in electronics stores have mostly vanished.
$3 is still cheaper than digikey shipping.
I cant see it surviving as just a shop. Shops can't even survive selling full size PCs, there isn't that much more repeat custom to expect from something that costs 2 orders of magnitude less.
I'm not convinced the idea makes sense financially, unless they're selling all of the extras and kit parts needed to make the Pi do something useful.
If they are, then fine. If not this might look a little like a vanity move - not because it's a bad idea, but because retail in the UK can be insanely expensive to run, and it's outrageously hard to make it profitable.
The description somebody else gave here of the Pi shop as "more of an event space than a store" would tie in well with this strategy.
They usually do make sales, or direct you to the site to complete the purchase, but the whole experience is supposed to be designed to improve on the classic horrid car dealership sales process.
They do. The sales process is basically the Sales Rep sitting you in front of a PC and letting you order it through the Tesla website while they sit idly by to answer any questions and guide you through the ordering process. It takes less than 15 minutes.
It's stupid simple and zero pressure compared to regular automotive sales.
In the showroom you customize your vehicle, place a reservation order, and pay an initial order amount (e.g. ~$3500 for the Model 3). You'll then receive two emails, the first confirms your order and the second provides you next steps you must perform.
The next steps are:
1 - Select Delivery Location
2 - Provide copies of Driver's License
3 - Provide proof of Vehicle Insurance
4 - Provide Payment Method
5 - Process Trade-In
The steps don't have to be completed in any particular order but I was instructed to wait on steps 3 and 4 until after I received a hard delivery date from Tesla.
It's all handled electronically and is relativity simple. The Payment can also be done upon delivery.
There are many things like that. For example, normal people say "tin", in my experience, but the signs in a shop seem to use "can" more often than "tin", bizarrely. You'd probably find many similar example if you walked round some UK shops looking at all the labels.
There's also a whole work/office jargon used in modern Britain: words and grammar that people use at work but wouldn't normally use at home or in the pub.
In general I don't like jargon. To me it seems both pretentious and small-minded. On the other hand, an obscure technical term, used correctly, is like a beam of sunlight or a breath of fresh air. To me, at least. Though they sometimes borrow from each other, jargon and technical vocabulary are very different things.
Sorry, I mean inclined to lacerate.
From the OED (the entry has not been updated recently):
> Chiefly N. Amer. and elsewhere outside the U.K. In early use, a shop on a large scale, and dealing in a great variety of articles (see quot. 18082). Now, equivalent to the British use of shop n. 3.
> The use of the word in this sense has not become common in the U.K. except in Comb., as chain store n. at chain n. Compounds 3, department store n. at department n. 5 (see under the first elements), store detective n. at Compounds 1d(a), in which it still refers to a large shop.
I might refer to the "Apple store", but would always refer to the local barber shop or coffee shop.
I wasn't aware until now that this is considered an Americanism.
I wasn't aware until now that this is considered an Americanism
BHS was founded by by a group of U.S. entrepreneurs, however, it is generally accepted usage to refer to various retail spaces as shops or stores synonymously. Some even use it as their brand identity e.g. The Body Shop, The Gift Shop, The Tie Store and now defunct Army & Navy Stores et al.
Nevertheless, there are certain distinctions to be made, i.e. when someone says 'I am nipping out to the shops - do you want anything?' usually means a visit to small local independent shops/convenience stores, colloquially referred to as corner shops (bodega/deli) situated on the High Street and not mean Harrods, albeit it might also qualify as a local shop for some of the residents in Knightsbridge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_%26_Navy_Stores_(United_K...
Really cool stuff, just nobody ever really seemed to have a reason to buy anything of reason in the store.
I bought filament for my home-built 3-d printer there maybe once - only because it was higher quality than what MicroCenter carried and was a color I'd otherwise have to order.
But obv most people in the store weren't buying $2k 3d printers - anyone who happened to already own a 3d printer knew that MakerBot's tech was garbage.
https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/raspberry-pi-4-everything-we-...
It seems like the issue is current spikes, and those can occur under far more conditions (HDMI, external USB devices, etc.).
I suspect that beefing up the power system filtering would reduce the power supply maximum current requirements quite dramatically.
The Beaglebone Black guys seem to work inside a 5V 500mA envelope quite well. At the very least, they don't seem to have anywhere near the issues that the RPi folks seem to.
Can you be more specific? "Full HD" usually refers to 1080p, which all Raspberry Pi models can easily handle for h264 video due to their hardware decoder. The Raspberry Pi 3 can handle most other formats through software just fine, though it may struggle with more intense formats like 10 bit h265. For that, an Odroid C2 may be what you're looking for. They advertise:
>H.265 4K/60FPS and H.264 4K/30FPS capable VPU
It doesn't have that much RAM but they have models with 8 core CPUs, USB3, and one with SATA. They're around $50.
In my opinion they should severe ties with Broadloom and open up to global competition.
Given the complexity of the modern software stack, there have been a zillion bugs that have ruined someone elses day and have been hopefully fixed.
Although, I have no idea of the support quality of the Pi foundation since I have not used their products.
The platform is sufficiently beefy to run lot of non-trivial applications. It's not like those applications have magically increased in complexity.
We've just been brainwashed in the consumer space to always demand bigger numbers so that the vendors have something new to sell. There is really no need for a certain category of desktop applications to get any slower with time, or, to be able to provide any more value regardless how fast they are run if the interactivity level is already so fast that improvements would be undetectable by humans.
Note: this is not an argument that the current Pi "is fast enough for everything". I'm saying it's fast enough for some things, and the mature software stack is considerable added value.
The big ones, in my opinion, are the write-limited, slow SD card interface, the microUSB power connector, the 1GB maximum RAM, Ethernet that shares bandwidth with USB, and ever-increasing power requirements.
I think the Pi Foundation wants to churn out more new units by increasing the CPU speed, but with the super slow SD interface and the capped-out RAM, performance hasn’t made significant improvements in a long time.
I also think it was a bad decision to not focus on open-source software with the Pi. They have been including proprietary user space applications forever (Mathematica, for instance), the GPU boots a proprietary ThreadX operating system that has DMA and complete CPU control, and the thing requires lots of binary blobs to boot. The education aspect (particularly as a low-level programming platform) would have been made more accessible without such an opaque boot process.
Not that I disagree, but as a counterpoint learning programming with Scratch has very little to do with getting to know the implementation details of the underlying computational substrate. I'm a software professional and I can't bother with that stuff! I'm far more interested in fiddling with my programs than tweaking the underlying substrate. I don't think this is a stance everyone should take but I don't feel a worse person because of it. I can administer my own machine but I don't enjoy it.
I don't by contrast program on my phone because it just feels like a gimmicky toy.
I'm not saying the raspberry pi is anything like a phone in this regard, but in does have a limit to how far you can dig, and that's a real shame.
Is it limiting to the scratch programmers? Probably not, but the Scratch programmers read about and move on Python, who then move on C. But if the boot process isn't open, there isn't anyone to write about it, so people don't discover it. Which for an educational endeavour is problematic.
I realize the difference between $300 and $1050 is a lot, but you get way more hardware at the $35 price point. Building the institutional muscle to figure out how to get the additional $650 in funding is a good skill set as a teacher. (If you're at a school, there might be special funds set aside for buying STEM equipment you can tap into. You might also be able to get some money through the charity arms of local companies, or out of a local bank's petty cash fund. If you're teaching students at the middle-school or high-school age, you can ask them to help with the fundraising process. If you're teaching adults, just charge each adult a fee to cover the hardware cost.)
That seems a quick way to discourage adults from taking programming courses. Should they pay for a chair and table too? Or a screen? Of course not, that cost is amortised across many classes.
It's ridiculous that the Foundation makes bulk purchasing so difficult when the original vision for the RPi was for education. But that was fairly quickly forgotten when it became the darling of hackerspaces and upselling became the priority.
As one example, if May’s current deal somehow was to be made tenable to Parliament, there would probably be little/no change at all.
Still, good to see the Raspberry Pi team continuing to fulfil their mission.
Deleted comment
But who knows, they probably did the math better than me, random internet commenter #9643.
Raspberry Pi is the kind of product that could really benefit from a quality retail experience. I suspect there are a lot of parents who might have heard of Raspberry Pi, but don't really know what it's all about and don't have the confidence to buy a kit and try it out with their kids. If you've sold someone a Raspberry Pi and given them good advice on how to use it, you're substantially more likely to go on to sell them a robot kit or a 3d printer or a bunch of Adafruit goodies.
I don't know about the experience, but this product has some retail presence in US & Canada.
On just sales income it seems doubtful.
But in the end the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a non-profit whose goal is to get kids interested in programming, and give them the hardware they can experiment on without worrying about breaking your parents' or school computer. Sales to "hackers" is just a side business.
An event space / showroom can help with that mission for kids and parents who might not buy online and get started on their own.
The centre map file was last modified on October 18th last year, though the modification may have been to some other part of the map.
I'm not sure about that. The Raspberry Pi foundation is big on the education market. I can definitely imagine a parent having heard about a raspberry pi but not really understanding what it is in detail wanting to talk it through with someone.
I can also imagine them running hack days for kids there (kind of like games workshop allow you to play with warhammer in their shop).
As a multiple* RPi user, it's always heartening to see them doign well.
*(1) media player with TV, (2) wireless music player in kitchen, (3) VPN server in the cupboard, (4) temperature sensor in the garage.