Raspberry Pi's founder Eben Upton says a chat with Eric Schmidt in 2013 prompted him to scrap plans for pricier, more powerful devices and create $5 Pi Zero
The Raspberry Pi Foundation … Richi Jennings / Computerworld : Nooo! Raspberry Pi Zero sold out at $5: It's Google's fault
Context & Ripple Effects
Days after Raspberry Pi unveiled the $5 Pi Zero — 512MB of RAM and a processor 40% faster than the original Pi 1 — founder Eben Upton has revealed where the radical price point came from: a 2013 conversation with then-Google executive Eric Schmidt that convinced him to abandon plans for pricier, more powerful boards.
The reveal lands alongside confirmation that the board ships free inside December's The MagPi magazine, and the first production run has already sold out at $5 — evidence that the strategy Schmidt nudged Upton toward found its audience immediately.
First-order effects
- The Pi Zero sells out at launch, leaving would-be buyers unable to purchase the board directly and pushing demand toward the MagPi magazine bundle as the only available channel.
Second-order effects
- A national-interest magazine becomes an accidental computer distributor, giving The Raspberry Pi Foundation a circulation-based sales channel that bypasses component retailers entirely.
- Competitors in low-cost single-board hardware face a $5 anchor price backed by a charitable foundation, making spec-for-spec price matching structurally difficult.
Third-order effects
- If the Schmidt-counselled path holds, Raspberry Pi's roadmap stays indexed to affordability rather than performance tiers — though the company's later admission that 2023 would be a recovery year from supply chain shortages, delaying the Pi 5 shows how tightly a deliberately underpriced product amplifies any supply disruption.
The trend: Single-board computing is being pulled by foundation-backed pricing toward maximum affordability over spec escalation, with distribution and supply chains absorbing the strain that choice creates.