The Raspberry Pi Foundation is dropping the price on one of the older models of its minicompute board.
The Raspberry Pi Model B+, which launched last year and was the last version of the original board that was released in 2012, will go from $35 to $25—a move that comes as the competition in the space becomes more fierce.
In a post on the foundation’s blog, Ebon Upton, Raspberry Pi founder and foundation CEO, said that “production optimizations” that were made for the development of the Raspberry Pi 2—which was released in February with a price of $35—made it cheaper to make the B+ model.
“With this in mind, we’ve decided to drop its list price to $25,” Upton wrote. “If you’re looking for a Raspberry Pi with networking and multiple USB ports, and don’t need the extra performance or memory that the Raspberry Pi 2 brings, you might want to check it out.”
When the first Raspberry Pi was released three years ago, Upton and other foundation officials hoped the credit-card-size computer would encourage students to learn how to program. It did that, and officials also are finding some companies use the board. The Raspberry Pi Foundation reportedly has sold more than 5 million units.
With Raspberry 2, the foundation added a more powerful processor—an ARM Cortex-A7—bulked up memory to 1GB and included support for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 10 operating system. The minicomputer had already run Linux.
Since the product’s release, the foundation has sold more than 1 million units of Raspberry Pi. At the same time, the Model B+ also continues to sell well, Upton wrote.
“The Raspberry Pi product line now stretches from the Model A+ at $20, via the Model B+ at $25, to the top-of-the-range Raspberry Pi 2 at $35,” he wrote.
A growing number of vendors are rolling out minicomputers and compute boards. Most recently, Next Thing Co. started a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to develop the CHIP, a $9 ARM-based tiny computer that will be able to do a range of tasks, from Web surfing and checking email to playing games and editing documents. The company was looking to raise $50,000. With 22 days left in the campaign, the company on May 14 had received more than $1.24 million.
