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Comment by Chatting | Hacker News Reader

I question whether it's wise to launch a new product before the supply chain issues which have plagued Raspberry Pi for years have been fully resolved.

Granted, the situation has improved slightly over the past few months. But you will still find Pi 4s out of stock more often than not.

The CEO said last year not to expect a Pi 5 in 2023, because they wanted to take the time to recover. Why the u-turn?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/21/23520400/raspberry-pi-5-...

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The point here is likely to pull the rug out from under scalpers' feet.

With the Raspberry Pi 5 out in two weeks, all the held-back inventory of older models will be dumped, prices will plummet, availability will become a non-issue.

In that sense it's a wise move.

Finding older models were also almost impossible in the past two years. It's unlikely that Raspberry Pi 5 will solve the issue. But even so, it's not a wise move because what is the point of bringing a new model when they can't make it available to normal people?

> they can't make it available to normal people

I guess you haven't been looking recently? I can go to a local store and pick one up. It looks easy to pick up one online too.

https://rpilocator.com/

I think I've seen Pi Kits at my local target. The issue with those is, they're for niche things I might not care about and now I got tech waste on my hands, but also might not be the exact model I want.

Note I'm not disagreeing, just saying in some cases, the ones in-store are kits.

I wouldn't expect Target to carry bare Raspberry Pi-- how many people walk into a Target wanting a Pi with no accessories?

I have and it is still a pain. Many websites still have limits on how many you can buy. The situation has improved but it is far from what your comment implies.

Many websites still have limits on how many you can buy.

For a hobbyist / individual, is that really a big deal? I mean, how many do you need at one time?

Anyway, the claim all along has been that supplies would be "back to normal" by the end of this year, and so far things seem to be tracking that way. If you look at rpilocator.com now, the entire first two pages are full of green lines, which is a DRASTIC improvement compared to just 6 months ago. And some of the major distributors are getting in shipments of 5,000, 6,000 at a time of some models and having them in stock for weeks on end. So one can clearly see that the situation is improving rapidly.

That said, I will make no claim one way or the other with regards to the question of whether or not shipping a Pi 5 is a "good idea" or not.

The Raspberry Pi 5 will only be for sale to individuals until the end of this year (no industrial customers competing for inventory like the older models)

Plus, they're only launching the 4/8gb models to start. So there'll be another wave of cheaper ones a little later. Really hoping they still hit the $35 price point on the 1gb model.

Mouser sold about 3000 Pi 4s in the last couple of weeks. I'm hoping a few scalpers are about to get seriously burned.

Interestingly Digikey has over 2000 left. I wonder if they are limiting quantities.

On a similar note, I'm genuinely curious as to why Pi chose the "authorized reseller" model instead of selling them directly.

B2C, small quantity sales are not fun. B2B selling pallets full.

They do also sell them directly, though not in large quantities. They even have a retail store somewhere in the UK.

Because world wide sales is really hard.

Having trusted local resellers is a much more scalable way to sell to local markets.

I'd be surprised if reselling through authorized sellers isn't much simpler and problem-free than selling them directly.

I also expect that using resellers ensures better odds of protecting the brand/project goodwill. Resellers deal with problems like "I paid a ton of cash for a board and it arrived late and/or broken". Support alone is a nightmare, and I recall that raspberry Pi struggled with PR when they started out. I vaguely recall Liz Upton being behind some ill-advised episodes that didn't improved Raspberry Pi's image and would get anyone other PR person sacked.

If scalpers are able to sell a product at higher price, doesn't that mean the company priced the product too low?

I think scalping is more of a supply issue, raising the official price of the product would only require more cash when scalpers are doing their buying.

Raspberry should raise the price until scalping isn't profitable. Keeping the price low is just handing money to scalpers that should be going towards future product development, until they can meet the demand.

I think it's completely acceptable so long that a legacy compatible "Pi SE" options would be available, in Pi 3 and Pi 4 form factors.

Raspberry Pi are used installed as components into third party engineered products, and Raspberry Pi brand holds no value to potential industrial customers if new products did not technologically exchange with existing such products. That is to say the exact mounting details, electrical compatibility, software compatibility, DO provide the value the "Raspberry Pi" brand offers if its competitors offered it.

What I'm saying is, if Espressif brought that new ESP-branded 32bit thing in the Pi 3 mounting dimensions and onboard eMMC and 1/5th performance at $35+9%, that kind of thing could outsell Pi 5 at this rate, and I wouldn't mind watching that happening.

Check out the “obsolescence statement” on the Raspberry Pi product pages. The 3B+ will remain in production until at least 2028 https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b-... and the 4 until at least 2031 https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/...

Remain in production could mean like the nano 2 W which is manufactured in such small numbers it’s never in stock.

It’s available to buy from several places https://rpilocator.com/

Not in the US it’s not.

https://rpilocator.com/?country=US&cat=PIZERO2

(Btw I misspoke and said nano when I meant zero)

Or it may require a large order up front.

There's nothing stopping a person from putting an ESP on a RPi B board format (or a Zero one), other than certain IO limitation. The upcoming P4 might be a candidate [0]. If you are interested in sbc in Pi form factors (B, Zero, CM3, CM4), then something I follow is CNX [1]. It will typically have notifications of any new Orange Pi, Libre Computer, etc.

0. https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-P4

1. https://www.cnx-software.com/news/raspberry-pi/

It would be amusing if they used a pi2040 chip to drive the IO pins on such a board. I'm sure there's cheaper chips out there to do this.

It might make sense given pi2040’s PIO capabilities. Additionally, the RPi5’s io chip, RP1, might have some similar tricks inside.

The Raspberry Pi Pico has a fascinating peripheral known as the “Programmable Input/Output” (PIO). This device allows us to write very simple assembly programs to emulate a number of different peripherals and communication protocols.

https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/projects/raspberry-pi-pico-...

RP1 is our I/O controller for Raspberry Pi 5, designed by the same team at Raspberry Pi that delivered the RP2040 microcontroller, and implemented, like RP2040, on TSMC’s mature 40LP process.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/

It may be that whatever is currently bottlenecking RPi4 production isn't relevant to RPi5.

The RP1 I/O custom silicon hints that this may be the case

Through hole components resulted in previous Pi's being slightly slower to manufacture, the Pi5 only uses surface mount components which should increase Sony's build cadence.

The bottleneck has been component availability ("supply chain"), not manufacturing.

Upton talked about this in an interview. It's partly the interplay of manufacturing at this point, too.

When they have parts, they'd like to catch up with the backlog faster. Because the 5 doesn't rely on the robots that place through-hole components, its production can to a degree "overlap" with the Pi 4, basically increasing the total number of boards created per hour.

Having two SoCs that don't require the same machines also helps ease a bottleneck there.

That seems like talk about the future. There can be only one bottleneck at a time.

"Don't expect it" to "launching Q4 for individual buyers" isn't really a u-turn.

Or it's a great way to counter the shortage by instead offering a new product that uses parts more easily available. We'll see.

I'm much more surprised that they decided to launch with a GPU that would have been considered awful if it had been released with previous pi four years ago.

Would you consider it better than no GPU at all?

The recent crop of unrefined, made-for-experimenters RISC-V chips that have GPUs that are a LOT faster. Add an extra $0.50 to the chip cost and use an out-of-the-box Mali GPU that's several times faster and has better driver support courtesy of ARM (who now support the open source drivers).

Quite possibly they weren’t expecting to be ready to launch in 2023 but the design/supply/capacity issues were resolved quicker than expected.

CEOs lie, thats in their job description.

My little pi CEO anecdote: Eben Upton visited local hackerspace many years ago, someone asked about Pi2 (or maybe 3) potential release date and should he wait or buy now, Eben answered they arent even planning next version. A week later Pi2 was announced.

Meh, that's pretty standard practice due to the Osborn effect. [1] At the Pi1 phase, Rpi was a pretty small company. It wouldn't have been great for them if rumor got spread far and wide that Pi2 was on it's way in a week or two.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

I think the criticism of saying "we're not even thinking of a replacement" is fair, the standard dodge "we don't have anything to announce at this time" which is enough to avoid the Osborne Effect.

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