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I've seen a lot of talk about the Raspberry Pi since its public unveiling and even more since it became available to anyone for purchase. Together with the iPad, and possibly other tablet computers, I would say the Raspberry Pi is the most interesting computer for education that has been unveiled in the last 10 years. It's cheap, comes without anything like a case or other things many would expect in a computer these days, and it's now made in the EU. Great for open source, made for education, relatively locally built, and by coincidence a great little piece of kit for people who like a cheap computer to muck around with.

People have managed to make a whole slew of different operating systems run on the Raspberry Pi, including one of my favorite alternative system, Open webOS. Beyond just the bare bones of an operating system, there are also hundreds of applications readily available for dozens of different use cases. And I haven't even gotten into the hardware hackers grounds for the little computer yet. Needless to say, people have been building some very impressive things with the Raspberry Pi already, with more things on the way each and every day.

It was really only a matter of time before people started misunderstanding the Pi on every level imaginable.

There have been comparisons to "real servers", after which some people have come to the conclusion that the Raspberry Pi is woefully underpowered and lack several features that they would like to have. When it was revealed that the Pi could run Android 4.0 a lot of people laughed and some even got irate, since in comparison with the latest smartphones, the Raspberry Pi didn't have neither the RAM nor the CPU power to do it justice. Heck, I've even seen some people complain that they can't run Windows on the Pi, and that it is useless as a result.

None of these things have been promised as a function or intent of the Raspberry Pi. Compared to much higher specification hardware it will, of course, not stack up, but that's also not the point of the whole thing. The Raspberry Pi foundation worked long and hard to make the device as cheap as possible, while still making it useful from the perspective of running open source software and making programming an enjoyable learning experience for kids today. But since this is the age of self-centeredness deluxe, it doesn't stop people from seeing the world with them as the norm and everybody else as the exception. The same illness I really dislike in tech journalism.

One of the most impressive feats of computer engineering in recent years, and people are complaining that is doesn't meet their arbitrary criteria.

Robert Falck

Robert is a freelance tech writer from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on the British Tech Network, listen to him yap away on the British Tech iOS Show and read even more of his stuff on his site streakmachine.com or you can even follow him on twitter @streakmachine.

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Robert Falck

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