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Comment by polshaw | Hacker News Reader

I can't say I can hold zero blame for the rPi gang on this clusterfuck.. offloading the task was never going to help, it should have been obvious RS/Farnell were not ready- Amazon were the only retailer that could have handled it. But I don't see why they couldn't have handled the orders themselves (Amazon again?).

Apparently someone from RS sales has now said they aren't selling any until the end of the week! How insanely disorganised.

And 10K was also clearly never going to be close-- there were even far more forum members than this. I wouldn't be so grumpy if they didn't make me get up at 6AM for this crap.

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They didn't exactly make you get up at 6AM. To be honest even if everything had gone smoothly, it should still be obvious given the hype that everyone individually had only a small chance of getting one from the first 10K batch.

And I think they were entirely justified to make a small (if you call 10K small) production run ahead of everything else. It's not like they're an established manufacturer and retailer.

It dismays me that people are so quick to criticize others when they haven't been in their shoes and are blessed with hindsight. I understand it's 6AM and you might be a tad more grumpy than usual, but... really. Some of the comments on Twitter make it sound like people were owed one of these.

"They’ll be manufacturing and distributing the devices on behalf of the Raspberry Pi Foundation"

I dont think Amazon is in the business of manufactoring hardware for others.

Yes, but this was the launch being done with boards that were already built in China. What they really wanted to have happen today was to get the 10,000 units into the hands of their fans as quickly and painlessly as possible, get a polite apology to those who didn't get one, and then hit the PR bell with their big brass "sold them all in 10 minutes" hammer.

"Nobody knows what the hell happened but I didn't get one" is probably not the takeaway they were hoping for on launch day.

Yeah, not getting one is one thing. The probably inevitable emails of "Yeah, you know we charged your credit card and said we'd ship you a Raspberry Pi... well, we're not... please wait 4-8 weeks" are far, far worse.

Thank you for this clarification, and nicely said would've been nice to get an update a few hours ago stating they weren't taking U.S sales, same thing happen for the eBay auction, forgive me HN just needed to vent

This is somewhat embarrassing for them, especially since they so confidently claimed to have everything under control. Kind of makes you wonder if there's any flaws in the device itself. I guess it those will have time to surface before most of us can get one though :)

Handling a launch like this isn't very hard if you don't ignore the problem.

They ignored a lot of experienced advice given to them freely to get to this point. Its a shame really as this could have been a magically moment where they shifted a million devices in a week. Instead we are looking at 404 pages and there are no devices available if you do get through. A lot of potential customers have just been gone and will never return.

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