Raspberry Pi 2 Review: A $35 Computer Can Do a Heck of a Lot
An open-source computer that encourages you to look inside — The small, bare-bones Raspberry Pi 2, meant to encourage children and adults to build and engage more with computers, does more than you think. WSJ's Joanna Stern puts it to the test.
Context & Ripple Effects
Joanna Stern's WSJ verdict on the $35 [[entity:raspberry-pi-2|Raspberry Pi 2]] lands mid-story: the open-source, deliberately bare-bones board is pitched at getting kids and adults to build and look inside their computers, and her testing finds it 'does more than you think.' The review matters less as a spec sheet than as mainstream validation that a $35 ARM board can stand in for a real machine.
What came after confirms the review caught a franchise at an inflection point. Later in 2015 Raspberry Pi cut its own floor with the $5 Pi Zero; by late 2020 the Pi 400 put the computer inside a $70 keyboard, reviewed as a functional $100-class desktop running both Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu Desktop; and in 2021 the $15 Zero 2 W added WiFi and a 64-bit CPU aimed at emulation and automation projects.
First-order effects
- Hobbyists, students, and educators get a WSJ-endorsed answer to the question 'what can $35 actually do' — Stern's finding shifts the purchase case for the Pi 2 from toy to legitimate small computer.
- For Raspberry Pi, mainstream press validation of the $35 board cements its positioning around openness and tinkering ('meant to encourage you to look inside') rather than raw performance.
Second-order effects
- Raspberry Pi responded to its own success by stretching the lineup instead of chasing specs: the $5 Pi Zero took the price floor down within months, segmenting the market between ultra-cheap embedded boards and full-capability ones.
- By 2020 the line had moved up-form-factor as well — the keyboard-integrated Pi 400 competes directly for basic-desktop buyers, a category a bare circuit board never touched.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the single-board computer stops being a niche educational gadget and becomes a durable product ladder — roughly $5 to $100 — spanning automation projects, emulation boxes, and budget desktops, each tier reinforcing the same open-source ecosystem.
- That structure favors whoever owns the ecosystem over whoever wins any one price point: reviews of the Zero 2 W and Pi 400 judge them against the software and community built since boards like the Pi 2, not against their component cost.
The trend: Single-board computers are maturing from one cheap educational curiosity into a price-and-form-factor ladder that reaches from embedded automation up to budget desktops.