Raspberry Pi: An update for element14/Premier Farnell/Newark customers

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1081

by tudorw • 14 years ago

47 11 14 years ago

tudorw2• 14 years ago

Update: E-Bay UK has them in buckets... about £140 for the leading item right now...

Great news that the Pi is shipping, there must be a lot of eager people out there, cannot wait to see the first wave of responses, genuinely exciting times ahead :) Oh, and don't forget to add one of these to the order for open audiophile audio out :) http://nwavguy.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/odac-released.html

"We now have in excess of 100,000 confirmed orders for the Raspberry Pi globally and can confirm that everyone who ordered before 18th April (i.e. today!) will definitely receive their Raspberry Pi before the end of June 2012, whatever your existing order confirmation says! "

chrislomax• 14 years ago

That really gets on my tits that, people buying a product and selling it for a much higher price. I'm all for supply and demand but £100 - £150 more than the retail price is pathetic!

If they didn't want them in the first place they shouldn't buy them!

getsat• 14 years ago

You'll see this same behavior anywhere demand greatly exceeds supply. I know I'll never see a Raspberry Pi in real life because they refuse to meet demand for whatever reason, so it doesn't really bother me.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

From a business perspective it just means they (the Raspberry Pi folks) didn't make all the money that is to be earned by these boards. So if you walk by a table and it has neatly stacked 5 pound notes on it, and it says "Free Money" are you going to get angry at someone for going up to the table and picking up a stack or three? No of course not.

Now you could argue that the R/Pi folks could have gotten better funding for their causes by taking that money, and they did some of that with the initial 'alpha run' auction they did, but when the wave passes it will be irrelevant.

Now I personally would have sold them for a bit more (we've had lots of conversations on HN about it) and used the extra to fund a small tech support team to keep the problem reports manageable and turn around community discoveries and work arounds for problems into active out reach, but that is just me.

There are lots of factories in China which could make 250,000 of these a day and not blink if they had the parts so I'm not concerned that supply will always be this tight.

sireat• 14 years ago

140 quid is an insane amount of money to pay, when at that price there are plenty of stronger boards available, just take the BeagleBoard-Xm which has a much stronger chipset, or even stand alone Ainol A10 boxes for around $100. The nonhackers could grab a A10 based tablet, for $120 or so.

About the only thing RPi has going for it is the slightly smaller size factor (at >$100 prices).

In theory, the first Raspberries should have been sold for $70-$100 by the foundation and only when mass production was assured, then the price should have been dropped to the target $35 for B.

The only catch in this dream scenario is: how do you convince the early adopters to pay higher prices, if you are committed to lower prices later on. You do not want to lie to your customers. Maybe some sort numbered certificate system should have been made something like OLPC program, buy one Raspberry for $70 and school or your choice gets one for free when mass production is ready.

linker3000• 14 years ago

Probably not a good time to tell you I have mine sitting next to me on the desk running Debian!

It's a great little board - it's early days and there are a few rough edges; for example, they're especially fussy about the 5V supply rail and some people are having issues with cheaper micro USB cables and adapters, for example, things work well until the CPU gets a bit loaded, current draw goes up, the 5V rail drops a bit and the network disappears. A lot of this fact-finding stuff is appearing in the wiki though to help out those who come by later.

I predict lots of fun and interesting times ahead.

ihartley• 14 years ago

This is irritating: I still haven't figured out how to buy one and I "registered my interest" with both of the initial suppliers, neither of whom have contacted me with purchasing info, within hours of the release annoucment.

Raspberry Pi: An update for element14/Premier Farnell/Newark customers

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