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Raspberry Pi 5 not arriving in 2023 as company hopes for a “recovery year” [arstechnica.com]:

Few who have tried to buy a Raspberry Pi in the last year may be shocked, but Raspberry Pi's CEO has an update on the next Raspberry Pi model: it's not arriving next year.

In an interview with ExplainingComputers [youtube.com], Eben Upton reviews the supply pressures [arstechnica.com] that have impacted the single-board computers' availability. Eighteen months into "restrained availability" of the device, Upton says the company is positioned to set aside hundreds of thousands of units for retail customers [arstechnica.com]. He notes that the companies primarily taking up the existing supply of Pi units are not gigantic companies but "mom-and-pop operations" that have based their hardware products on the Pi platform [arstechnica.com] and buy a few hundred Pis for their needs.

"We don't want people to get on a waiting list," Upton tells ExplainingComputuers. "We want people to wake up in the morning, want a Raspberry Pi, then get one at 9 am the next morning."

Into the near future, however, that next-day Pi is likely to be a Pi 3A+, a Pi Zero 2 W, or, later and with some luck, a Pi 4. The Pi 5 is not in the cards any time soon.

"Don't expect a Pi 5 next year… next year is a recovery year," Upton said. "On the one hand, it's kind of slowed us down. On the other hand, it slowed everything down. So there's merit, I think, in spending a year before we look at introducing anything… spending a year recovering from what just happened to all of us."

Introducing a Raspberry Pi 5 that couldn't "ramp properly" to demand, or ate into the supply of other Pi devices, would be "a disaster," Upton said. Not all shortages are chip-related, Upton notes. "Some of them are about packaging, some are about test capacity, some are about substrates." Those processed, too, could be cannibalized by an all-new product, Upton said. "We're going to be very ginger about how we look to move forward."

You can hear Upton's take on RISC-V possibilities, Pi pricing, industrial applications, and more at ExplainingComputers' video interview [youtube.com].

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