Are all of the devices the same?

Question

I just saw a picture of a Pi on the Element 14 website, and noticed some of the components are different colours and shapes to my Pi, (which was from E14).

• The colour of the RCA plug (Mine is black, not blue)
• Colour of the Audio jack (Mine yellow, not black)
• Printing on the Ethernet port (Mine on metal on the top, not on a sticker on the back)
• Shape of the long components. (Mine regular cuboids, with a flat top)

So they're obviously not all the same. In fact, could they all be uniqe?

Answer 1

The beta boards look rather different from the production boards. However, I have two production boards (one from RS and one from Farnell), and though they look very similar, there are minor differences between them. Not the least, the top of one SoC says "hynix" and the other says "SAMSUNG".

There are minor differences between the labelling of some of the other components too. However, neither of my boards have a big "CE" stamped on them, but I know that many do (between "Power" and "C1"). The RPi Flickr group is interesting to browse for minor variations such as these.

Incidentally, I don't know if the "CE" stamp is meant to be "China Export" or "European Conformity" - I'm guessing the latter, but it isn't the correct symbol for either! ;-)

Answer 2

There may be minor differences between different boards - different batch runs could use slightly different components in appearance, though I'd expect them to be functionally identical (at least to within some reasonable margin of error.) It's not unusual at all on these sorts of devices.

As to whether they're all unique though, the answer is no - I have two that look identical, and I can imagine in the vast majority of cases ones from the same batch will be practically identical.

Answer 3

A few beta boards were sold on eBay, prior to the production boards going on sale. They could be slightly different, but the RPis I have seen from Farnell and RS are the same.