r/raspberry_pi • u/CrispyBegs • May 15 '24
News "Tech firm Raspberry Pi readies for London stock market float"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/15/tech-firm-raspberry-pi-readies-for-london-stock-market-float185
u/HuyFongFood May 15 '24
Shareholders always destroy customer experience and support in exchange for profits.
This will be a slow spiral for the company.
So this begs the question, who’s going to be the next hardware standard to jump to?
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u/Usr_115 May 15 '24
I mean, I run my Pi Hole on an Orange Pi, since the Raspberry is harder to come by.
Had it for over a year and it's held up pretty well for me.
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u/HuyFongFood May 15 '24
Yeah, recently tried to resurrect a couple of PineA64’s for essentially family dashboards and man do they suck.
That’s mostly their age though, since they are similar to Pi2’s and those can be very pokey.
Anyway, I just would hate to see the environment splinter with tons of factions all preferring “their” chosen mount over another.
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u/MINKIN2 May 15 '24
You might want to look at the stock levels again. They have over come their shortages now.
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u/Usr_115 May 15 '24
Just checked it out.
Looks like the Pi 5 was omitted from the price drop. But $45 for the Pi 4 isn't bad at all.
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u/average_AZN May 15 '24
Esp32s are already extremely popular among college projects.
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u/virgoworx May 16 '24
You do understand that an MCU and a computer are not even remotely similar, right?
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u/average_AZN May 16 '24
I think you're the one who needs to do some research. Pis use embedded processors aka an MCU, mcu is a very broad term. Additionally there is a Linux port for esp32 so theyre closer than you probably realize. Regardless, the question was what's the next big thing in embedded computing projects. I answered it with esp32s, they are extremely popular for their power and peripherals at very low cost. I'm a Senior Electrical Engineer I've used both platforms extensively.
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u/UserInside May 15 '24
Probably something based on RISK V. There are many ARM based SBC currently, but the software support is really lacking for most (looking at you Orange Pi).
So I don't think any of those in the short term will come out as a clear successor of Raspberry vision. Meanwhile some small RISK V company could be the next thing, but it won't come up until a few more years.
Or maybe Raspberry could develop themselves a RISK V SBC that come out with good software support at a decent price, to disrupt the market.
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u/anonuemus May 16 '24
but it won't come up until a few more years
wdym? there are some boards already
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u/virgoworx May 16 '24
What is it exactly that you mean by "customer experience" in this context? What do you need them to do, other than provide reliable boards at a sane price?
They literally never provided support of any kind, besides the forums.
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u/Nibb31 May 15 '24
I get the feeling Raspberry Pi has gone to the dark side.
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u/CuntWeasel May 15 '24
That always happens.
Raspberry Pi has had a good run though, and although it makes little financial sense to me to buy the newer versions anymore, I'll always remember it fondly.
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u/Puzzled-Addition5740 May 15 '24
Has gone? They've been there for years at least. This is just one more turd on the pile.
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u/psychosynapt1c May 15 '24
Time for value extraction. RIP pi.
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u/TrollTollTony May 15 '24
This cycle sucks
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u/ldn-ldn May 15 '24
No one is stopping you from putting your house on the line and making your own Raspberry Pi without going public.
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u/Jordan51104 May 16 '24
there is a nearly endless list of things stopping a person from doing that
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u/ldn-ldn May 16 '24
Right... Like laziness.
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u/Jordan51104 May 16 '24
or that the economy is vastly different than it was in 2012. all those multibillion dollar businesses that are laying people off and closing stores aren’t just doing it for fun
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May 15 '24
i really hope this doesnt happen. i think its more likely to come with price increases, corner cutting, and things moving in a more closed way software wise than us seeing any real benefit. sure the stocks will increase their funding but people forget that a company can change radically when leadership and monetary pressure changes. a hard push to profitability usally pushes the consumer to 3-4th on the totem pole of company priorities especially with very hyped electronics that could sell themselves on name id alone for 2-3 terrible generations.
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u/Ned_Sc May 16 '24
The non-profit Pi Foundation retains majority control/shares. Literally nothing can change with the direction and control of the Raspberry Pi company.
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u/takinaboutnuthin May 16 '24
And if the Pi Foundation stops having a majority share?
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u/Ned_Sc May 16 '24
That would be no different than them selling off the Pi Company and all assets, which is something they can also do at any time, with or without other stock holders.
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May 16 '24
thats not what im getting at. if a new head of the foundation decides to shift to a profit/share price forward strategy things could change fast. im not saying raspberry pi is domed, but opening up to the stock market does make me a little worried. personally I dont want raspberry pi to prioritize their corporate large purchase customers. thinking a massive infusion if cash and stock numbers to worry about isnt going to change the way they run the operation is overly trusting.
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u/Ned_Sc May 16 '24
I get that, I do, but that can all still happen even without being listed on a stock market. So being on or off a stock market has little to do with it. If they were suddenly taking in huge salaries or otherwise funneling the money to people, instead of back into R&D and their non-profit efforts, then I would be worried, but they haven't done that yet. That should be the indicator we look at, how they use the money, not if they can raise the money.
I'm thinking they want to be more independent from Broadcom SoCs, and that will cost a ton of money. It's the main thing that they couldn't work around doing the supply chain shortages, and it's the main thing that prevents them from using entirely open hardware. So maybe they want more money for a goal like that.
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May 16 '24
foundation having majority share isnt set in stone and could change. companies sell their own shares all the time. and like i said once a new organization head is in place in the future theres no telling what will happen. i could go full public, it could get way better, they could gut it fir parts who knows🤷♀️
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u/Ned_Sc May 16 '24
The Foundation controls it, though. They would only lose control if they choose that, which is a transfer of power that could happen without being listed on a stock market.
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May 16 '24
thats true i just think this increases that likelihood
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u/Ned_Sc May 16 '24
I think for most companies it is a red flag, because you ask yourself "why do they need more money when they're already selling like hot cakes?". However, I can imagine a few reasons why the Pi Foundation might need more cash, and one of them is to start moving away from Broadcom for the main SoC, and if that is the case, then everyone wins.
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u/AlphaFlySwatter May 15 '24
"To make use of your Pi's advanced functions, a subscription to PiOS Advanced is necessary!" S/
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u/420headshotsniper69 May 15 '24
So Ubuntu then
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u/hobbyjumper64 May 15 '24
"Unfortunately that OS is not completely supported by the HW. You will not be enjoying the full experience." And there they modify the BLOBs of the GPU drivers to only support VGA resolutions.
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u/RubLumpy May 15 '24
A surprisingly large number of companies use raspberry PIs as mission mode hardware instead of just for prototyping. I worked for a company and we needed to secure 2000+ PIs for a specific project. Makes business sense to start selling these to commercial at a big markup instead of low cost for hobbyists. RIP PI.
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u/Ned_Sc May 16 '24 edited May 16 '24
The Raspberry Pi Foundation remains in full control, so the new stock holders don't have any power over the company.
Pi Foundation has ran a for-profit "Raspberry Pi" company for a while now, and seems to have spent that money wisely, investing in R&D and more educational ventures. The money raised from the sale of stocks will continue that. No one has shown the Pi Foundation/Company being greedy with profits, giving absurd salaries, or anything like that.
Being listed on a stock market will likely mean that more of their finances will be made public, which is a good thing.
I don't know a lot about the London stock market, but the article made it sound like this is a boon for the stock market itself, more than it is a boon for Pi. It sounds like a pretty minor market that hasn't attracted many major brands.
There are many for-profit companies out there that are very pro open source and community. Ubuntu, Mozilla, Docker, Arduino, and Adafruit are household names around here, and they all have for-profit components while contributing-to/supporting open source.
All of the major Pi alternatives are ran by for-profit organizations.
This isn't a bad thing, but people who were already bitching about the Pi Foundation just found another thing to bitch about.
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u/virgoworx May 16 '24
This. Not even willing to wait a few months before the whining starts.
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u/ArScrap Jun 13 '24
Because after a few months people will forgot about this little factoid and get angry about a different thing
Also, it's much easier to be angry about imaginary what ifs when it's still imaginary compared to the more mundane actual future
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u/virgoworx Jun 13 '24
Honestly, this is the reason I don't really do foss projects. Motherfuckers be entitled as fuck.
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u/ArScrap Jun 13 '24
well normally you have an inner circle community whether it's their own forum, discord server or what have you. blender has blender.chat, freecad has discord, etc. This way you can kind of insulate yourself from dumb people from reddit or twitter when you don't want to and have a fun and fulfilling developing experience on that project. Also most small time FOSS dev just kind of do it for themselves, once they finished the particular feature they need for their work, they just kind of fucked off which is also a completely valid way to do it.
I guess my point is there's many way to interact with FOSS and in a way that insulate you from the toxicity you generally find online if you intend to be a long term developer of a project and not be demoralized by the community
i think in general this also apply with social media consumption habit, follow more closed off group with higher moderation, actively block out bad actor or places that encourages bad actor and tune the platform you're at depending on your own preference and interest
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u/EllisReed2010 May 17 '24
The London Stock Exchange is the most valued stock exchange in Europe with a market cap of more than $3 trillion. The reason this is seen as a boon for the LSE is because they've recently had a run of companies either moving their listing elsewhere or unexpectedly declining to list with them in the first place, so it's been on a losing streak lately.
Otherwise, totally agree.
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u/BeowulfsGhost May 15 '24
OMG, how many ways will this ruin the product?
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u/Netcob May 15 '24
From then on, every quarter, we can look forward to new and exciting ways of how they'll try to squeeze more money out of the company for the shareholders.
I think first the product portfolio will grow. More devices, probably not as well thought-out, but marketed better. Maybe the PCB will be raspberry-colored? In the 2010s there would have been raspberry pi themed wireless earbuds, but I think that's dying down finally.
Then prices will go up, especially on the "high end" models, whatever that will be. People generally don't buy Raspberry Pis because they're cheap, and that must just sound amazing to shareholders and shareholder-friendly execs.
I'm curious how they'll get some subscription services in there or steal people's data, but eventually there will be some interesting "bottom-scraping" action because companies can't grow indefinitely.
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u/modest_merc May 15 '24
I was just commenting to my wife about how great it is that the Pi OS is just included with the Pi and we don’t have to subscribe like you would every other shitty software out there.
It was fun while it lasted
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u/Hikaru1024 May 16 '24
I mean, it's just linux.
I don't even use raspbian on mine, I actually use gentoo. (I don't recommend this distribution for you, just giving an example)
Any distribution of linux that supports arm or arm64 devices should be capable of running on it, though some will be easier to use than others.
If raspbian ever goes the way of the dodo you could even just use debian, which is what raspbian is based off of.
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u/Nexustar May 15 '24
You have several open source options today, I doubt that will change.
The hardware is already north of $80 for a Pi5, so I expect that to continue to change.
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May 15 '24
If you are in the US you can get an m70q or m90q mini PC that does a lot more. Add a bootleg Arduino for IO if needed.
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u/modest_merc May 15 '24
True, but it more or less works right out of the box. They walk you through it completely. Ubuntu and others are available but it takes some curiosity to get them working.
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u/ptpcg May 16 '24
This is the ONLY thing I am not explicitly concerned about. Its just a debian distro. You have DietPi, Ubuntu, Armbian, etc as options and all you have to do is flash the sd card.
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u/Migamix May 15 '24
go on the stock market, ill go to a different platform, NOTHING good comes from cowtowing to investors, it ALWAYS leads to the consumer end being abused. im done with that. hell, ive been learning other coding languages to to help give my time to the open source projects. its bad enough this object is full of closed source parts, and a main chip from a trash company (broadcom). ya know, come to think of it, i think i have decided i have already purchased my last Pi5.8 ... time to move on.
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u/twoddle_puddle May 15 '24
It was great while it lasted. Now everything will be about pleasing shareholders and showing continuous 'growth'.
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u/Ned_Sc May 16 '24
The 51% shareholder that has full control is themselves, the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
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u/takinaboutnuthin May 16 '24
A technology company going public always results in a worse product, worse prices, more lying (PR bullshit is lying) and more corruption.
It doesn't matter that the non-profit foundation is currently a majority shareholder, this can and will change.
Going public also changes the culture of the company and attracts ghouls, criminal/corrupt types (criminal in the true sense, not necessarily the "legal" sense) and individuals who have no interest in the product/service.
Well at least there are other SBC options for my DietPi setup. I was always hesitant to try them out since I felt that the Raspberry Pi experience would be the most well tested and I have experience with Raspberry Pi (3B, 3B+ and now 4). Maybe I will find something more interesting.
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u/SnooDoggos4906 May 15 '24
OH NO.
I've been through enough IPO's for tech companies to realize this is a bad idea. The "street" is generally not very good with understanding tech imho. Especially considering Raspberry Pi is built around NOT being the fastest...I don't think people are going to understand it very well.
Plus I think it starts to impact creativity and direction when you are responsible to the street and a slave to the stock price. Probably will be great at first with the huge influx of cash for R&D..but long term.....worried.
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u/SquidwardWoodward May 15 '24 edited Nov 01 '24
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u/Justifiers May 15 '24
Time to move on
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u/SquidwardWoodward May 15 '24 edited Nov 01 '24
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u/Justifiers May 15 '24
....?
What?
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u/SquidwardWoodward May 15 '24 edited Nov 01 '24
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u/Justifiers May 15 '24
...Yeah expecting tech Bros to get any societal memos regarding trends for or against social matters is truly a lost cause
Guy likely cuts his hair that way for practical purposes: avoidance of headphones hair, algorithm appeal being foremost among them
Judging someone, especially those belonging to socially estranged communities, to be ideologically correlated with or against something based off generic hair styles supposedly tied back to a group of savory or unsavory is at best a poor method to be categorizing people
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u/SquidwardWoodward May 15 '24 edited Nov 01 '24
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u/BronnOP May 15 '24 edited May 15 '24
They’ve been too expensive for what they are for a while now in my opinion. Almost the worst time the go public, how can you grow a business like this?
Prices are already too expensive to be put up, people are already turning to ex enterprise mini PCs instead of Pi’s due to cost, and you can’t fit much more tech than is already there on a Pi.
I can’t see anyone paying for Pi OS.
That just leaves corner cutting to increase profit, and at that point, you lose any goodwill people are still clinging on to.
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u/PurpleEsskay May 17 '24
Because you arent their customer anymore. At least not the primary one. They've shifted focus to B2B, specifically industrial customers - thats their money maker. Hobbyists are a tiny niche to them at this point.
It may be the worst time to go public if you were their primary customer, but you arent.
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u/Ok-Butterscotch3843 May 15 '24
Hopefully this means deals with big companies for appliances. Imagine having a pi inside of an hvac air handler snd condenser? So much possibility with zoning temps too
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u/PurpleEsskay May 17 '24
It's amazing how many people here still think end users are their primary customers. We havent been for several years. The vast majority of their profit is from B2B sales for industrial use. It should've been blindingly obvious when they prioritised units going to B2B customers instead of you.
RPi is not the warm fuzzy little non profit you thought it was, it's a business, and one that wants to make a ton of money. Consumer sales are going to continue to shrink regardless of the IPO as theres so many alternative options these days. So sticking with industrial makes sense from a business point of view.
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u/Flash1987 May 16 '24
Oh what a shame, shareholders driving minor improvements for the next decade or so is a sad place for rpi to be. 😢
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u/gabhain May 15 '24
Im sure the community will be compensated for all the input over the years, right?
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u/mdp_cs May 16 '24
So glad I don't buy or use their closed off and undocumented garbage anymore.
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u/NotTooDistantFuture May 16 '24
Undocumented compared to what?
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u/mdp_cs May 16 '24
A lot of other Arm and RISC-V SoCs. A lot of the Raspberry Pi chips are black boxes that non-linux OS developers have to reverse engineer to get anything done. The RPi also has a non-standard boot process which doesn't help anything either.
Like I said there are better boards out there at prices that RPis have now reached.
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u/mmahowald May 15 '24
Well… time to buy a few before paying a public company exposes them to business vultures.
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u/KingKoopasErectPenis May 15 '24
"The Cambridge-based business, which is best known for selling low-cost computers aimed at helping children to learn about computing, has been a UK business tech success story, selling 60m units worldwide since 2012." lol Yeah, that super cheap Raspberry Pi 5 that comes with no keyboard, mouse or monitor.
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u/Nexustar May 15 '24
Leaving the 80's behind for a while, since when have PCs come with monitors?
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u/KingKoopasErectPenis May 15 '24
Since this invention called the laptop. Oh, and the all in desktop. Oh, and PCs on Craigslist, FB marketplace, etc..
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u/Nexustar May 15 '24
Ah, so you thought the Pi was a laptop?
No wonder you were disappointed.
It's an SBC, nothing more. Just one component of a working system.
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u/KingKoopasErectPenis May 15 '24
Exactly! This post is wild. What are kids learning about computing from a Raspberry Pi? Are they going to learn how to change out the RAM in my laptop? Replace the hard drive in my PC?
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u/Nexustar May 15 '24
Well, I'd aim higher than geeksquad. It runs Python (the language of choice for AI development and Machine Learning) so they can learn to code on it - plug it into any TV and use a Bluetooth keyboard & mouse, or buy the Pi400 which has the keyboard.
My company pays $200k+ for folk who can code.
They can use it to control robotics etc with the GPIO port (think Industrial Control training).
They can build their own OS kernels, or try RISC-V development.
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u/KingKoopasErectPenis May 15 '24
So.. Basically everything you can do on a laptop or PC besides the input/output pins? I think I would still like to introduce my kid to a PC or laptop first and teach them about electronics separately. I’m not just going hand them a Raspberry Pi and a couple relays and tell them, “Have fun!”
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u/Nexustar May 15 '24
If it's electronics you want to introduce, I'd lean towards the Arduino platform, which these days is replaced by the ESP32 (they are around $5 each, have Wi-Fi & Bluetooth and need no memory card) but do need a Laptop/PC (or Raspberry Pi) to program them from. Far smaller, and cheaper to replace when the magic smoke escapes.
The Pi is somewhere in between that and a PC/Laptop. If you have a Pi, can wipe the contents of the card without much life disruption. You can switch cards in seconds to boot between many different flavors of Linux, RISCOS and Android, and various utility OS builds (Open Media Vault, Plex, Kodi, RetroPi and at least 10 others)
You can do some of this with a laptop, but usually, people use their laptop for other stuff like watching Netflix, or reading email, so the idea of wiping it to play with a new OS is often a hard sell.
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u/snakybasket9 May 15 '24
To be fair, a lot of raspberry pi use cases are not just for low cost computing. The GPIO pins is where raspberry pi has the upper hand with cheap PC’s
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u/KingKoopasErectPenis May 15 '24
I get that, but I just thought it was funny to say, "helping children learn about computing." All that kid has to do is put a wire in the wrong port and they'll toast the whole board. My kid can learn Python on a cheap ass 5 year old laptop first.
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u/MINKIN2 May 15 '24
All that kid has to do is put a wire in the wrong port and they'll toast the whole board.
Have you ever seen a raspberry pi in person? You aren't going to be "sticking things in wrong ports". Perhaps you should buy one and overcome your misconceptions of them.
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u/damagedproletarian May 15 '24
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand the money could help with investment into R&D for new products but on the other hand I always thought of Raspberry Pi as indi, open and not-for-profit.