I think it's important to consider some of what Raspberry Pi's mission [1] and how they have kept and/or swayed from that. Short version, the Foundation was es

I think it's important to consider some of what Raspberry Pi's mission [1] and how they have kept and/or swayed from that. Short version, the Foundation was established to support the education and development of skilled technologists (subtext: in the UK). It came from the observation that enrollment in Computer Science courses was dropping, and that the kind of accessibility and hack-ability of previous technologies was becoming less available to people with potential interests. Inspired by previous UK efforts like the BBC Micro (and other 8-bits), and other concurrent educational efforts, they decided their niche was going to be cheap, single board, all-in-one computers. What I really respect from the RPI folks is that they've really tried to focus on building a viable UK-based technology company - as much as possible, without being zealots about it. That's their unstated mission, to revitalize the U.K.'s technical capacity: - Based on an ARM processor, a British company - Has tried to keep as much manufacturing as possible in the U.K. (Sony UK Technology Centre) - Went public on the London Stock Exchange All that being said, I feel that they've deviated a bit from this as their primary mission. During COVID when supply chains were messed up, Pi manufacturing and shipping was prioritized to large scale buyers, where the supply then seemed to end up in industrial use-cases instead of the hands of people learning. I've heard an argument, which I do think is valid, that getting a familiar tech stack into industry provides an on-ramp into jobs to the same people who had learned how to do technology on those same Pis. But there's now at least a 2 or 3 year gap where new people couldn't really onboard into the ecosystem because of availability and cost. The second challenge is the Pi 5. I do think that expectations were simply too high here and the community was expecting basically a usable desktop with fast PCI lanes and gobs of memory for $35. What's delivered is amazing, but once you build it into a "desktop", you may as well have just bought a cheap intel desktop. And that I think is the real existential problem for the Foundation today. If I were the Foundation, post Pi 5, I would be looking very seriously at alternative form factors as the future. The CM line and HAT concept has been very successful, the hackability of Pis have been amazing. Perhaps there are ways to make the concept even more modular, or more hackable. Maybe offer baseline RAM amounts soldered on, but upgradability with new modules? Make other wireless technologies a core part of the offering (HAM Radio/BTLE/4G/LTE/LoRA, etc.)? Tap more into the 3D printer space with readily available mounts and housings that provide sufficient cooling and airflow. Ready-to-go cluster computing variants, why not mini-Blade-likes using Compute Modules? What ways can the core Pi technologies expand in order to serve their primary mission and expand the ways that people can learn about technologies? Perhaps they're thinking the same thing and this is why they need to raise more money? 1 - https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFoundationStrategy2018%E2%80%932020.pdf https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFounda...