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https://www.howtogeek.com/894161/the-great-raspberry-pi-shortage-might-be-coming-to-an-end/
According to Raspberry Pi CEO, Eben Upton, in an interview with YouTuber Jeff Geerling, the company put together 750,000 Raspberry Pi units in the first quarter of the year. That isn't a lot, but it also says that it's on track for building 2 million units this second quarter, helping it fill backlogged orders and paving the way for "unconstrained" supply during the remaining half of the year. Ultimately though, it means that you should expect units such as the Raspberry Pi 4 to be more widely available by the end of this year.
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Raspberry Pi Supply No Longer Dry
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday May 24 2023, @10:15AM (11 children)
Or it will not be enough units to make prices come back down to sane levels.
The reason for this is simple: Scalpers won't allow it. The "suggested" retail price of a RPi4 is somewhere between 50 and 80 bucks, depending on ram and various tidbits. The currently going price for one is somewhere in the area of 200 to 250. In other words, a scalper can buy 3, throw 2 away, sell one and STILL turn a profit.
And they will do just that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 24 2023, @10:25AM (4 children)
>And they will do just that.
Only so long as people are paying their prices.
I have never wanted a Pi badly enough to pay more than MSRP.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday May 24 2023, @03:55PM (3 children)
People are paying those prices, or else they would not do that.
There's tons of Pi projects out there that people want to have but can't port themselves to a cheaper and more readily available platform. 250 isn't breaking the bank for most of them since they only need one such machine for something like a Pi-Hole or a similar project. So they bite the bullet and cough up the dough.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 24 2023, @04:23PM (2 children)
At the $250 point, for a software only project like a Pi hole, there are so much more capable things out there in the NUC and smaller form factors.
I do hope the sane market prevails. I don't blame the Pi Foundation for preferring to supply people series manufacturing things with Pis over hobbyists. It's nearly impossible to discriminate a hobbyist from a scalper on the purchase portals, but if any of these series manufacturers' assigned MAC addresses show up in scalper hands, you can definitely mark them as "bad actor" and stop supplying them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Saturday May 27 2023, @03:48PM (1 child)
It's amazing how focused people are on the Raspberry Pi. I have a friend who wants to hook one up to his TV for retro game console emulation. I've pointed him to several alternatives that are still reasonably priced, but he's probably going to get an RPi anyway.
He doesn't want to manually install everything from scratch or modify configs every time he wants to do something with it.The convenience of being able to follow instructions on websites outweighs the cost.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 27 2023, @05:19PM
Yep. I do a lot of original development and I still value the Raspberry Pi ecosystem for the time it saves me in getting common stuff done/working.
Now, on principal I won't overpay for a Pi because that enormous support community only exists due to the exceptionally consistently low prices of Pi hardware and the relatively few configurations as compared with number of units sold.... But the value is there.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday May 24 2023, @10:31AM (5 children)
The "capitalism sucks" solution would be (/would have been) to increase the MSRP to reflect the shortage in supply and regulate demand (increasing supply would be better, but that wasn't possible). Scalpers can only scalp if something is being sold for less than the market will bear. They could always offer discounts on direct sales to genuine customers.
(Score: 2) by Ingar on Wednesday May 24 2023, @10:41AM
That's not "Capitalism" but "Free market".
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday May 24 2023, @03:59PM (2 children)
While nice in theory, it would most certainly utterly destroy the market for Pi forever.
One key reason why there is this shortage of Pis is that the Raspberry foundation gives preferential treatment to commercial implementers. Which makes sense from their point of view, no matter how much it may piss off the hobbyists, because that market is far more mobile and far less willing to pay triple or more for their goods from scalpers. If they don't get what they want at MSRP, they can far more easily migrate to another platform than the hobbyist who can often only just clone a github project, compile it and hope for the best because migrating is already beyond their capabilities.
But if they sell to commercial customers at MSRP prices and to hobbyists at the scalper prices, not only will hobbyists get VERY pissed, the commercial customers will simply shut down their production and join the scalpers. And then RPi is done for.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 24 2023, @06:36PM
> the commercial customers will simply shut down their production and join the scalpers.
Why would you expect them to do that? The market price is already ridiculous, having the OEM get in on the scalping wouldn't significantly change the market landscape.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday May 25 2023, @05:17PM
Hobbyists are paying scalper prices to shady suppliers anyway (or going without) and would probably be less pissed at paying the the Pi makers via reputable dealers. Commercial customers have invested in products & services built around the Pi and would be suicidal to join the scalpers - plus, they're buying on business-to-business contracts which, unlike retail sales, can have "not for resale" clauses added.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday May 24 2023, @07:16PM
Hopefully the availability will expand fast enough for the market to give the scalpers a richly deserved spanking and force them to hold a fire sale.