The founding father of Raspberry Pi has confirmed that getting maintaining the newest fashions will proceed to be a wrestle for normal shoppers for the foreseeable future.
Contacted by Jeff Geerling, an outstanding YouTuber whose movies commonly function Pi boards of 1 selection or one other, Eben Upton conceded that the issues described back in April are but to be resolved.
Particularly, Raspberry Pi has suffered from quite a lot of provide chain points which have made it not possible to supply boards in excessive volumes, a state of affairs made worse by the allocation of restricted manufacturing capability to bigger gamers.
Raspberry Pi scarcity
In December 2021, we reported on the beginnings of the scarcity of Raspberry Pi fashions. At the time, official resellers had been estimating they’d be unable to ship a number of the hottest SKUs for a lot of months.
In a weblog submission, Upton mentioned he anticipated providing chain challenges to proceed “all through a lot of 2022”, with the issue set to grow to be much less acute as extra manufacturing capability comes online and logistics bottlenecks are resolved.
Nonetheless, the restoration has been hindered by different exterior elements too. Particularly, the scarcity has been aggravated by a plague of scalpers, who’re utilizing automated bots to scoop up any provide that does hit the cabinets, with a view to flipping it for revenue on secondary markets.
The same drawback has made it extraordinarily troublesome to pay money for the newest graphics playing cards and online game consoles, a few of which have been offered on at exorbitant costs.
Worse, Upton advised Geerling that whereas Raspberry Pi ringfences a proportion of inventory for normal shoppers, the precedence is at the moment to ship on large-scale orders from OEMs and industrial clients. The rationale is that, in any other case, corporations reliant on Pi boards may “wither and die”.
