Do I want a large helping of Raspberry Pi? Yes please

OK so I am a little late to the hype around Raspberry Pi.  However it certainly doesn’t diminish my excitement around the single-board computer - I am after all a self confessed geek. So the basic premise of the product is that it will encourage and foster programming skills in the UK. Why does it need encouraging? It seems we now have it too easy. Certainly, you virtually needed programming skills to use the old email package Eudora in the 90s and this perhaps made us more inclined to ‘have a go’ with technology back then.

The idea behind Pi is that instead of being mere consumers it will encourage us to become creators and innovators; clearly we all want a slice of the action with the Pi selling like hot cakes at 700 per second. A manufacturing glitch from their foreign supplier may have held things up, but in Raspberry Pi’s defence it has talked a lot about the desire to manufacture in the UK. Apparently it is extremely tax inefficient and expensive to manufacture here - it does seem a shame the Inland Revenue is holding back this desire to develop UK innovation.

So has technology made things too easy? When Google first became popular I remember being extremely excited by what it could enable in research terms and would happily spend hours searching for random pieces of information. People do seem to have lost some of this excitement with exploration. So do I want a Raspberry Pi? Definitely, if only because there is just something strangely exciting about a circuit board, and also because it is good excuse to watch this sketch again about Apple, Orange and Blackberry :)