At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

It has nothing to do with "burning through the charitable donation money". The Pi is sold by a (profitable, AFAIK) wholly-owned subsidiary, the Raspberry Pi Trading Company. Manufacturing them does not absorb Foundation money at all.

They have been supply-constrained on components. It's that simple, surely. Eben Upton has said it again and again, and sometimes gone into detail about which components. They chose to try to keep the whole ecosystem alive, which meant prioritising commercial customers, they've been manufacturing millions of devices per year, and it still isn't enough to meet demand.

FWIW, if I was in their shoes I would have discontinued the 4B series entirely, by early 2022. I personally think they should not be operating in that segment with an SBC. I think there should just be a Pi 400 that takes a CM4. Both to simplify things in the educational sector, and to get out of the "high end SBC I am not using that is in my desk drawer" segment entirely.

They should focus on the Pico, which is clearly now their most interesting product line and their most interesting educational device.

Personally, it's the first I've heard of this.

I have heard them saying that the problem won't be solved at least until $SOME_DATE a lot of times. But this is a completely different statement.

> "look guys, we've burned through all the charitable donation money and this business model is unsustainable, we have to pivot"

AFAIK, the problem is that the chip manufacturer decided not to build it anymore. Again, AFAIK, none of the decision falls into the project. Besides, clones have been unavailable too, and if it was just about the project, the clones would still be created.

Yes, it's all a shame, and it had many bad effects.

AFAIK what they've been saying so far has at best been "we're able to continue making them at our current pace". They've also been saying they were focusing on commercial partners over consumers (which IMO is better because commercial customers need some level of assurance of future stock to actually use pi's in their designs).

Neither of those things particularly screams "Regular customers will soon be getting pi's in their hands"

December 2022 They said they expected better stock this year, which appears to be accurate.

I'm more curious to see if they can manage to make a PI 4 successor given how many years the pi 4 has been around already.

Yes, they are.

Disclaimer: CEO of Pimoroni - an approved Raspberry Pi reseller.

This announcement seems to be consistent with that. Not only that, but I'm seeing more availability now than earlier this year.

I see no need to call them liars.

I agree with your comment, but I can't let such an eloquent presidential quotation be so misquoted.

Bush said, "Fool me once, shame on – shame on you. You fooled me, [I] can't get fooled again."

One of the main options pointed at is low-power x86 boxes, which are better than Pis ever were. The rest of the ARM ecosystem is, I agree, poor.

> - people (often Americans) saying that the Pi has been "supply-constrained for five years". It really hasn't; it wasn't particularly supply-constrained in the UK until about five or six months into the pandemic.

Then it really has; there being a supply in the UK isn't exactly useful to most of the world.

> What I don't understand is this: how is it, if you've not been able to get hold of something for _five_ years, there's been no obvious co-ordinated attempts to get mainline support for the alternatives, or even any attempt to match the documentation? Five years was plenty of time to pick a single series of devices and match the same level of kernel support, surely? Couldn't it have been crowdfunded?

Partially, nobody was expecting it to actually take that long. If at the start of the shortage we'd known it was going to be 5 years, there probably would have been more of a push. OTOH some of the alternatives have been getting more polished.

> It's almost as if most of the people whining are just upset there isn't a cheap device they can drop into a Kodi box without any effort.

Okay. Yes? That's a valid usecase.

And Pi isn't even supported fully in upstream kernel! And it's so much worse in competitors...

> The truth is that the Raspberry Pi SBCs are unique because they are the product of their funding model. If you want "more performant" devices that are as good, you might need to front up the cash.

Not really. The key point why people want it is that they are by far most seamless product out of the competition (sans maybe some x86 ones I guess). 3rd-party patched kernel is always PITA especially over long lifetime but rPi got theirs in "near vanilla" debian-derivative so there is very little friction. And on top of that of course ecosystem that grew around it.

*if* there was competitor that have similar featureset yet work at 100% vanilla kernel there would be a chance but there is always some problem to deal with.

Right now it's basically supporting the old systems to keep those at least running.

Of course, that's not what I expected since I'd been personally affected by the shortage to retail, and because the others weren't aware of that, I probably looked worried over nothing when I suggested we explore other SBCs.

That said "you do you" and if you want to (poorly) run a bunch of stuff on a half-dozen Rasperry Pis (or whatever) then more power to you.

On the flipside of this, the wide ranging and very robust Raspberry Pi ecosystem kicked off a surge of people self hosting all kinds of applications and getting people to leave cloud services. For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that.

I'm glad that with the shortage people were forced to re-evaluate some of these approaches and projects to realize things like "Oh, this $100 used Intel XYZ is 20x faster and still low power enough to not mean anything".

With the launch of Willow and the Willow Inference Server I'm learning a lot about how people self-host and the variety is staggering. We see everything from "Well I run ABC on Pi 1, DEF on Pi 2, GHI on an old mac mini, and XYZ on an Intel NUC" to single Raspberry Pis to extremely complex Proxmox configurations. I understand a lot of this self-hosting infra grew gradually over the years but needless to say a single, cheap, reasonably powered machine can do all of that and more.

True.

> compelling offers in the same form factor and upstream support to a certain degree.

But that degree matters. What SBC has the best upstream support these days? Orange? Banana? Pine? I honestly don't know, despite taking a casual interest. Also, upstream and driver support gets worse if you need a newer chipset, to support features like 4k or H.265 or USB PD or 2.5GbE. To be fair, Raspberry Pi doesn't offer the latter.

Personally I switched pihole and a few other servixes to a docker container on a USFF pc. Still using a pi4 for retro games

It doesn't hurt that the OS is a very well-supported Debian derivative, but the uniformity of the ecosystem is a massive benefit you don't really get anywhere else.

I don't necessarily agree with that, but it is a pretty great starting point. The competition has a very long way to go to be comparable. Performance is also seldom the limiting factor.

I think their scarcity has made us all appreciate what having consistent low-power SBC platforms with convenient programmable interfaces is. I found uses for every Pi 0/2/3/4 I had that had been sitting disused because I was too excited to move to 4s when I really didn't need more power.

What is your suggested favorite replacement? All the less that I’ve looked into are either just as hard to get and expensive or are discontinued before they gain ground. Happy to consider other options.

Could I spend more for a better board like the RK3588 boards? Sure, I have a Rock5B and Orange Pi 5. But I don't want to spend more for performance I don't need.

FWIW I think they really are. In the middle of last year they deliberately pivoted both MagPi and Hackspace Magazine to projects involving the Pico, and they've done, IMO, a very good job in demonstrating that many of the educational projects around the Pi Zero are little more than simple Python (usually) scripts that toggle a few GPIO pins. Not only do they run just fine on a Pico or Pico W, it's arguably of more obvious educational value to see them running on such simple devices.

Their messaging has been consistent going back to at least sometime last year, from what I can tell: things will be tight at least through the end of Q2 2023 (albeit improving towards the end of that range) and will get much better through Q3 and Q4, with normal (pre-pandemic) availability by sometime in Q4.

So far things seem to be tracking exactly along that path. Prices on the scalper-resold Pi 4's on Amazon started dropping precipitously about a month or so ago, and have dropped from north of $200 USD to around $120 USD (for the 8GB model). And rpilocator consistently shows far more availability of different models than it did a couple of months ago.

Clearly we aren't "out of the woods" yet, but one can absolutely start to see the lights of civilization in the distance if you look.

https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-Computer-Suitable-Workst...

The decision that nobody likes that they had to take, surely, was to try to preserve the commercial ecosystem that exists around their products, not least because a) it helps them achieve the economies of scale that make the devices cheap, and b) so many of those commercial products have educational implications.

The Foundation is quite literally not responsible for the devices being prohibitively expensive, and indeed as far as I can see, when official resellers regain stock, they do so at prices very close to the pre-crisis prices, when you take into account rampant general inflation. The Zero 2W is going to be slightly more expensive. The Pi 4B seems to be at the same price.

And the Foundation's goal is more about access to computing _education_; I would argue they are still achieving things on that level, because many of their activities are more general than the Pi.

> For those who have been having problems getting one, is it because they've been hoarding them?

They retail for well under $100. You’ve been buying from scalpers who are jacking up the prices.

MSRP-priced retailers haven’t been able to keep stock in years, and often sell out within minutes of getting inventory.

Some people just want their first or second RPI, but aren’t willing to pay scalpers. I don’t know how many people are hoarding them, but I know some people prefer them to arduinos and more simple microcontrollers. Many people are more familiar with Linux development instead of embedded development.

When they were cheap $35 boards, the advice was buy one per project.

It's reasonable to expect the 5 to arrive in 2024 at the earliest. Personally, I wouldn't expect super fast m2 ports and whatnot.

Frankly, at this point I am ready to spend a bit more and get a proper 5800u mini pc or something. Waiting for AMD's Zen 4 APUs to hit the market. They are not going to be cheap, though

“Don't expect a Pi 5 five next year,” Upton said [in December 2022], explaining that the Pi team sees 2023 as a year to spend “recovering from what just happened to all of us [COVID, supply chain issues].” https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/21/no_rpi_5_2023/