CEO: Raspberry Pi inventory to hit 1M units monthly, starting in July
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Those prices would be great if you could actually buy one for that. I have not seen a Pi 4 of any variety for less than $100 and usually much more.
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Upton and company have abandoned their mission, which was to make an educational tool available at a price most people could afford. My school has had an order for 48 Pi 4 machines on backorder since July of 2020. And yet, people manage to acquire enough Pi 4s to be selling "kits" on Amazon for $155. The "kit" includes power supply, case, and a couple of heat sinks, so about $20 of extra stuff. And a profit more than twice the retail price of the Pi.
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Yea!!!!
Frankly, there are plenty of hobbyist SBC on the market now that are superior to the Pi on technical measures. However, none matches the Pi ecosystem width and depth. It's the latter that really differentiates it from the rest and makes the Pi still such compelling products.
The Pi Zero 2 W is really hard to beat as the superglue to hold other electronics and software together on prototype and one-off product runs.
Frankly, there are plenty of hobbyist SBC on the market now that are superior to the Pi on technical measures. However, none matches the Pi ecosystem width and depth. It's the latter that really differentiates it from the rest and makes the Pi still such compelling products.
The Pi Zero 2 W is really hard to beat as the superglue to hold other electronics and software together on prototype and one-off product runs.
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To whomever writes these headlines: please study up on the distinction between inventory and production.
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Note that Amazon has never been an official reseller. Even back when supply was free, all Raspberry Pi models sold for $5-10 over retail on that site.
Even eBay was a better deal back then.
Until the shortage abates, the only reliable way to find a Pi at MSRP is to have patience while observing rpilocator.com.
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I've been getting far more frequent notices for Rpi4 4GB and Pi Zeros from Adafruit lately ( a couple a week) so it does appear to be improving. Still gotta jump on them immediately after the notice, however. And Adafruit limits you to 1 unit over X amount of time
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I had a project I needed two Picos for recently. I'm lucky enough to live near a Microcenter, and while the Pico has never been constrained in the same was as the zero/3/4 models, I still had to talk them into letting me buy two. They had a "limit 1 per household" rule in place. They even said if I bought one, went out to the thai place next door and had lunch, then came back to buy another they wouldn't allow it.
I managed to talk the manager into letting two of them go, but it was a close run thing.
I managed to talk the manager into letting two of them go, but it was a close run thing.
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Yay. Maybe now we can actually purchase some this year. I'd love to pick up about half a dozen at retail price.
This is good news, though still rather frustrating that this is good news.
Also, there is some interesting irony considering Sony is the ones helping them. -cough-PS5-cough-
This is good news, though still rather frustrating that this is good news.
Also, there is some interesting irony considering Sony is the ones helping them. -cough-PS5-cough-
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Carpetsmoker
Ars Praetorian
What other choice did they have? Let all the businesses which use RPis go bankrupt? That's even worse.
People (possibly but not necessarily scalpers) selling stuff on Amazon isn't really RPis fault.
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Inventory, or production? I doubt they want a million units sitting in inventory.
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For better or worse, the foundation has made plain that hobbyists will go to the back of the line when the going gets tough. I don't think that's going to change in the near future.
The most unfortunate part is that there aren't any great drop-in RPi replacements out there to take the Pi's place when the going gets tough.
The most unfortunate part is that there aren't any great drop-in RPi replacements out there to take the Pi's place when the going gets tough.
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Is that in addition to their factories in the UK? I remember one of the things they were most proud of was bringing that manufacturing in-house domestically. I remember Sony was originally one of the several producers making the first Pi boards back in 2012-ish.
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Stock... where? None of my usual stores have anything.
Note that I don't need one now so don't need help finding stock. It's just that it's nowhere in the places i've bought Pis from before the pandemic. And they're specialized hobbyist electronics stores.
Note that I don't need one now so don't need help finding stock. It's just that it's nowhere in the places i've bought Pis from before the pandemic. And they're specialized hobbyist electronics stores.
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I have had “zero” issues buying the Rapsberry Pi Zero through pishop. Checking rpi locator shows it is a available in different parts of the world:
Find Raspberry Pi computers in stock - rpilocator
Find Raspberry Pi computers in stock - rpilocator
rpilocator.com
Chances are their “authorized sellers” list is out of date.
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Bullshit. Find me a comparably priced board with software support anything like the Pi's.
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Do point to a competing ARM-based SBC with fully functional and practically useable (ie. not just with some single vendor-specific, proprietary app, for example) HW-accelerated encoding and decoding pipeline, CSI- and DSI-interfaces -- including some actual cameras and displays that work with those -- and that run actually recent kernel.
No? Well, they're really not on-par, then, now are they?
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I spent a while trying to come up with an alternative to a Pi4 for a project I was working on, with fairly modest requirements (needed working WiFi, in particular). Finding anything with a complete set of reliable, working drivers for all the hardware on the board was pretty much impossible.
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Let's not be so quick to forget what Raspberry Pi Foundation has done for the space in general, and what they continue to do in terms of software, documentation and support. Consider the amount of public code supporting all kinds of sensors and actuators that was released because of the RPi project.
I would love to have CM4 boards back in the US but I'm not going to cry foul about the organization who essentially founded sector; They've done a lot more than just sell cheap computers.
I would love to have CM4 boards back in the US but I'm not going to cry foul about the organization who essentially founded sector; They've done a lot more than just sell cheap computers.
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IIRC, same journo as the HDD article "average age at death = life expectancy" debacle. So... don't bet on it.
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I would gladly pay $45 for a Pi4. I bought a Pi3 "Kit" years ago for $45ish, came with overclocking heat-sinks, paste, power supply and a case. "Some assembly required"
The same kit today for a Pi4 2GB is $110 - and is Out of Stock.
But alas - seems they still have the I2C clock-stretch bug in them?! ugh.
The same kit today for a Pi4 2GB is $110 - and is Out of Stock.
But alas - seems they still have the I2C clock-stretch bug in them?! ugh.
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Eben had a tough decision to make: There was no "good" or "right" answer, just pain no matter which way he turned.
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A lot of SoCs seem to not support clock stretching if you're using the hardware controller. Most of the time you can just disable it and use the software bitbanging i2c driver instead. Bonus you can set it to use any gpio
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...obviously i haven't been keeping up with the times because in my mind the raspberry pi is still a niche hobbyist product: what's the nature of industrial-scale applications driving 1MM/month demand?..
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HandymanHandy
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Doesn't matter when they just give them all to their corporate customers and leave barely anything for consumers.
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They've long had special "compute module" versions that were on a daughterboard format for industrial prototyping and product development. It would have the Pi SoC and requisite bridge chips, but no other pre-installed I/O other than maybe flash storage. Usually these were sold in a DIMM-style format so prototypers could use off-the-shelf RAM slots to attach their own carrier boards with whatever gizmos they wanted to pair with the Pi SoC to develop their doodad.
With the Pi 4 generation they switched up to the CM4 board. It had the more powerful SoC and PCIe hardware of the Pi 4 and the Pi corporation decided to shift production to focus more on churning these out so that people could use them in small-production stuff like routers, etc.
Then the pandemic hit and supply chains went out of whack. The Pis were still under contract to churn out so many CM4 boards and they let the Pi 4 fall by the wayside to prioritize it. They wanted to buoy the small-brew industry around the CM4 rather than the people buyhing Pi 4s for single DIY projects. That's on top of all the other pandemic-related shortages that absoutely everybody else had to deal with when it came to components.
As a result, getting any Pi at all became a search for unobtanium and just about the only option was to turn to scalpers who charged 1000% markup.
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This seemed a bit curious to me, since that's the decade-old chip only used on the Raspberry Pi 1 / Zero / Zero W, and I would have thought the newer chips would be more relevant. But that was what he said:
while also mentioning "industrial demand" for the Pi Zero in particular. So it sounds like that wouldn't have kept shelves full for hobbyists wanting the higher-end Pis, but it would have helped the small businesses who designed products around the Pi Zero. Presumably stockpiling millions of the more expensive chips wouldn't have been affordable.
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That was also mentioned in the Geerling interview, and Eben's main points were:
"there really is a shortage of good, licenseable, [really] high performance cores. Because remember, we're shipping an A72 on Raspberry Pi 4. So if RISC-V is going to go into a future Raspberry Pi, you need something which is much, much more capable than A72. And there really aren't many cores in that space."
"There's still a lack of maturity in the software stacks, particularly bits of the Linux userland are not well optimized at the moment for RISC-V architectures. [...] even the Arm world is pretty immature compared to the Intel world, the RISC-V world is immature then compared to the Arm world. That can be overcome and Arm overcame it, not completely, but to a sufficient degree. And I'm sure RISC-V can do that, but it's going to take years."
"Microcontrollers are more interesting. The cores are simpler, the software stacks are shallower. There are a lot of places you can go and license an M-class RISC-V core. [...] Would we do it? I don't know. I mean the Arm value proposition is really strong, right? It's a really strong community, and it's not expensive to play in it."
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Sony themselves are manufacturing it, or Sony contracted someone else?
Just curious as afaik Sony rarely manufacture complete stuff. They are more on manufacturing the various components / parts
Just curious as afaik Sony rarely manufacture complete stuff. They are more on manufacturing the various components / parts
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Didn't we have this exact argument on the last article? Who buys a Pi (or really any SBC) for AI or neural network training?
"You keep saying this word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
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I've been happily substituting used mini PCs off ebay. The only spec in the requirements you've listed that this doesn't meet is that it's x86 not ARM.
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Mini PCs as in SFF or what? If we're talking about typical SFFs aimed at offices, I'm not aware of any of them having any available CSI- or GPIO-interfaces, not to mention the form factor isn't anywhere similar to the RPi or the likes and thus that's an entirely apples-and-oranges comparison.
On the other hand, if you're talking about something like e.g. the Odroid H2/H3 or Up Squared, then those are way more expensive and not really competitors for the RPi, either.
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