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Comment by flyinghamster | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively, most of the production has already been snapped up by large customer(s). NEC is offering them as an option for their commercial displays, for instance.

They do have a history of underestimating demand, though. The original 26-pin Raspberry Pi was unobtanium for a long time after it was introduced. Some things never change. :) The pandemic-related supply chain woes can't help.

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At release, we wanted to add support to our product line for the CM4 and needed some to test. However our MoQ was 200. Fast forward to today, we can’t really get CM4s or regular pis fast enough. We recently secured enough for the next 4 months (~800 Pi4 8GB,) but it’s always a battle to find large quantities.

We have a vendor that assembles these for us, so they all come pre-assembled. We’ve swapped parts in our BOM for these at least 13 times in the past year. Change SD cards, change microHDMI adapters, power supply, change case, pi model, etc. Relatively painless, but becomes a problem when 30 days of back order is ~150 raspberry pis.

I still wouldn’t even consider swapping to another device, though.

What's your product line if you don't mind me asking?

Zero-touch deployment kiosks, plug in and go

Yes, many will remember the crazy waiting lists for the Pi 10 years ago. They did not expect to get a huge amount of demand so early.

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