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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

> Pimoroni was shipping Pi 4Bs last week.

How many? Four? Six? Did they go to scalpers as usual?

We shipped thousands last week and we didn't ship them to scalpers: https://shop.pimoroni.com/pages/ordering-restrictions-for-ra...

Plenty more will come in short order, the past couple of years have been a real mess on supply chains - it's been hard on all of us.

It looks like it's not possible to order one unless you've ordered something from Pimoroni before 12 May 2023. The only one in stock currently is the Pi Zero. So unfortunately it's still the same story. Yeah, we had lots of stock, but it's gone now and you couldn't order it anyway. I hope it gets better soon, and all this pent-up demand doesn't collapse once stocks are full.

AFAIK Pimoroni have had those "existing customer" measures in place for some months for the Pi boards; it's not a new measure. It's a good way of resisting scalpers, IMO.

As is allocating some of the stock to the "essentials kits" that most new customers actually need anyway (particularly Pi 4B customers; the official USB-C PSU is one of the few safe bets).

This is correct, and we have been able to ease up on the restrictions a bit recently:

  - we reset the date before which you needed to have a previous order
  - the Pi Zero W is now available to all customers up to 10 per order

I appreciate it's been frustrating but things are improving and will continue to improve - you'll see a lot change over the next couple of months I'm sure.

We've done our best during this time to combat the scalpers - no solution is going to be perfect but we did what we felt was right to give our loyal customers as much support as we could.

I've ordered something now to at least get in the queue for the next time. Hopefully by then, some Zero 2 boards will be available.

Nope. You could actually order Zeros in packs of 10. There is increased availability of many models - the Zero 2 W, however, has an in-chip memory package that makes it a rarer item in general, and will take a while longer to ramp up.

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