Raspberry Pi sells 4.5m units, approaching UK sales record

Raspberry Pi is positioned to become the bestselling UK-made computer of all time, according to a new BBC report.

Ahead of Raspberry Pi 2’s launch later this month, founder Ebon Upton tells BBC that lifetime sales for Raspberry Pi have reached 4.5m – just 500,000 shy of overtaking the ZX Spectrum, originally debuted in 1982 by Sinclair and pulled from retail in 1992.

Raspberry Pi sells an average of 200,000 units per month, but that figure is expected to be up with the impending launch of the new model – the tech of which makes it six times more powerful for a variety of applications, according to Upton.

"There comes a point when there’s no substitute for more memory and CPU performance," Upton wrote on the Raspberry Pi blog.

"Our challenge was to figure out how to get this without throwing away our investment in the platform or spoiling all those projects and tutorials which rely on the precise details of the Raspberry Pi hardware."

Raspberry Pi 2 will also offer free access to Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 10 OS.

"Raspberry Pi has quickly become one of the Maker community’s favorite platforms because their highly-capable, low-cost boards and compute modules enable developers to bring their vision to life," Windows IoT Group GM Kevin Dallas wrote over on the official Windows blog.

"Raspberry Pi 2 is a surprisingly powerful device that opens up the world of computing and programming to a huge range of people and skill levels.”