I think Wolfram will be on the case. They are an agile company, and Stephen has been running it with a distributed work@home approach for years.
I also think people are overworrying the use of Rosetta 2. Generating the code the first time an app is invoked seems a superior approach to the 2006 PowerPC Rosetta approach. Apps should perform OK, and intelligent developers should be able to rapidly rebuild for the new instruction set.
1. Because something like the Raspberry Pi 400 doesn't compete with anything Apple sells.
2. Because Wolfram Research gives away full-blown Mathematica for this platform, and more people should get their minds blown by that.
3. Because hacking rudimentary electronics through the GPIO interface (provided with the Pi 400) is a tremendous way to learn.
4. Because the Pi has a boatload of learning apps.
5. Because nobody in North America is offering the Raspberry Pi in retail stores. AFAIK, there are only a couple of stores in the UK.
That was a great April Fool's joke. I missed it when it came out.
Thanks for giving your reasons. My view is different. Regardless of how good a product the Raspberry Pi is, I don't think it makes any business sense for Apple to sell it.
Apple's stores are designed to be clean, simple, and focused on selling and supporting its product lines. So they only sell Mac devices, and selected accessories for them. The Pi is an entirely different computer system, running an entirely different OS, that Apple doesn't support. It would only serve to create customer confusion, and distract from that focus, for Apple to offer such a product.
I.e., right now their stores only sell products that are/support/work on Apple devices. Why would they want to have sales staff taking time away from that to explain an entirely different computer system, whose purchase has nothing to do with bringing people into the Apple ecosystem, and which (if the customer has issues with it) they don't support?
Apple of course does have a strong educational component but it is, as makes sense for a business, centered around getting kids to learn computing using its own devices.
Now you might argue that Apple would be serving a public good by promoting the Pi. If Apple is willing to do more to promote the public good, it makes more sense for it to direct its efforts to do more to improve its own business practices, e.g., treatment of foreign workers, and recyclability of iDevices, etc. (yes, they are working in those areas, but there is room for improvement), and increase its charitable donations (e.g., highly-subsidized iPads for impoverished schools).
