> The Pi has been used as a tool to teach and learn programming
I can't help but think that the vast majority of buyers already knew a lot of what they were doing. But... I could be wrong.
Regardless, it was a good product and had wild success. I'm glad they made it.
Having gained experience with them in that context, I introduced them in my 12-year old son's school. The kids love them - they're small enough and cheap enough we can let the kids take them home (if a few don't come back it doesn't matter). That makes all the differnce - you can't learn programming in a couple of hours a week at school, but if you can start there and take the same computer home, you're far more likely to put in the hours to get good.
And, at least as good as the hardware, is the community that's grown up in the last year. Loads of excellent educational material is now freely available, and aimed at school kids. So much easier to get the teachers on-side when you can point them at all this material.
But the funnest thing is that I used samba to mount the music directory on my desktop, so that I can ssh in and play music from my cellphone from anywhere (it's connected to the speakers and TV in my living room). I also use it to play videos from the video library on my desktop.
It works brilliantly well -- if you have a DLNA-compliant TV, you could use that as well to stream media from what is basically a wireless media centre.
[1] http://shr1k.github.com/post/2013/02/16/setting-up-a-raspber...
What's wrong with that? Why does a teaching tool need to be a near-useless way too expensive hunk of shit that nobody would want because it has no utility outside a narrow range?
I've incorporated the Rpi into a course. The only thing inconvenient about its popularity is that they are sometimes out of stock. But, on the other hand, its sales volume probably helps keep the cost low; and the popularity means that there are many fun examples, and lots of free help developing curriculum and tutoring students.