Raspberry Pi: An update for element14/Premier Farnell/Newark customers
raspberrypi.org
raspberrypi.org
It's a great little board - it's early days and there are a few rough edges; for example, they're especially fussy about the 5V supply rail and some people are having issues with cheaper micro USB cables and adapters, for example, things work well until the CPU gets a bit loaded, current draw goes up, the 5V rail drops a bit and the network disappears. A lot of this fact-finding stuff is appearing in the wiki though to help out those who come by later.
I predict lots of fun and interesting times ahead.
Great news that the Pi is shipping, there must be a lot of eager people out there, cannot wait to see the first wave of responses, genuinely exciting times ahead :) Oh, and don't forget to add one of these to the order for open audiophile audio out :) http://nwavguy.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/odac-released.html
"We now have in excess of 100,000 confirmed orders for the Raspberry Pi globally and can confirm that everyone who ordered before 18th April (i.e. today!) will definitely receive their Raspberry Pi before the end of June 2012, whatever your existing order confirmation says! "
If they didn't want them in the first place they shouldn't buy them!
Some customers are willing to pay the higher price. If nobody will buy at that high of a markup, you can be sure the prices will come down.
So for whatever reason, those who feel it's worth the extra money can get theirs first.
Since this is such an inexpensive device, it's certain to become widespread. This price bump will be short lived.
How are they refusing to meet demand?
Yes they made some mistakes, not realising that they wouldn't be able to handle distribution and handing it off to Farnell/RS at the last minute = well you live and learn
Perhaps a silicon valley attitude company would have made a bigger splash, pre-sold the first 10,000 for $100 or done a kickstarter appeal to raise $1M and had an initial run of 100K units. Perhaps someone with west coast connections would have been able to get a few $M from someone at Google/Ebay/Facebook.
In my experience trying to get $M from charity foundations for something like this would take years and cost more in marketing than it cost to actually do it - ask the OLPC guys.
Funnily enough, their aim was to copy the success of the original BBC micro (= the UK equivalent to the Apple II). Back in the 80s when we actually made things - industry could get government loans to tool up to build products, now we just hand out trillions to banks.
Now you could argue that the R/Pi folks could have gotten better funding for their causes by taking that money, and they did some of that with the initial 'alpha run' auction they did, but when the wave passes it will be irrelevant.
Now I personally would have sold them for a bit more (we've had lots of conversations on HN about it) and used the extra to fund a small tech support team to keep the problem reports manageable and turn around community discoveries and work arounds for problems into active out reach, but that is just me.
There are lots of factories in China which could make 250,000 of these a day and not blink if they had the parts so I'm not concerned that supply will always be this tight.
About the only thing RPi has going for it is the slightly smaller size factor (at >$100 prices).
In theory, the first Raspberries should have been sold for $70-$100 by the foundation and only when mass production was assured, then the price should have been dropped to the target $35 for B.
The only catch in this dream scenario is: how do you convince the early adopters to pay higher prices, if you are committed to lower prices later on. You do not want to lie to your customers. Maybe some sort numbered certificate system should have been made something like OLPC program, buy one Raspberry for $70 and school or your choice gets one for free when mass production is ready.