Raspberry Pi - out of stock everywhere?
Why is Raspberry Pi out of stock everywhere? I can't seem to find these in stores (not even the RPi 3, or RPi Zero W).
Anyone has any info why this is happening? Black Friday and Christmas are coming, so I was thinking maybe these should be available for sale by now.
@DataIdeas - I know you "play" with these in your datacenters, so maybe you have ideas why this is happening, or maybe you have some hosting offers available.
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Component shortage affects manufacturing of the CPU used in Raspberry.
You can buy Nano Pi or Orange Pi instead.
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According to a YouTube video (I think from Jeff Geerling?) they're prioritizing supplying kit manufacturers and education before retail, so you might be able to get them bundled with something or through some back door if you have a legitimate claim to be using them for education purposes.
Yes, 4's are very hard to get and I didn't realize 3's were even being manufactured. Easiest is to get a 400 which is basically a 4 with a keyboard.
Holy sh*t time to sell my raspberry pi 3 B + I guess, could get right now what I paid for it back a few years ago
yea I got a rp4 and a couple odroid xu4 just sitting around, Sorta doubting the prices are coming back down any time soon. could sell the rp4 but would still be stuck with all the accessories
I sold the 3B with a handmade speaker for $35 in February.
It was purchased within 35 minutes of listing.
The unit was 6 years old and it retained the original list price.
I sold a pair of Zero W (ARMv6) with one LCD and one V2 camera for $98 in June.
It was purchased within 5 hours of listing.
The units were 5 years old and they retained the original price too.
I sold an NVIDIA Jetson Nano 4GB with low quality keyboard + mouse for $233 in June.
It's an auction and there's only one bidder.
The unit was like new and it got twice the list price.
My primary desktop computer is a 400 nowadays.
I still have a BeagleBone Black as my house web server and a 4B 2GB as spare.
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The prices of auctions in Poland for 3b+ go easily for 50+ $
Pi's bundled with accessories seem to sell well on ebay, suppose it depends how niche yours are.
If the power consumption and physical size isn't a strict requirement, second-hand 1L business desktop (aka USFF)s are a great deal. Lots of them in the $175-$400 range and can support 4C/8T CPUs and up to 32GB of RAM, plus 1x SATA and 1x NVMe M.2 drive. Additionally if it's vPro enabled you can use Intel AMT as IPMI. Can easily fit up to 4 onto a 1U shelf along with a 5 port network switch.
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Purchased one the other day - you can still get them with some luck
Also there is gonna be a pop up store in london in ~72 hrs that will have stock
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/the-raspberry-pi-store-pops-up-for-the-last-time-this-year-in-london/
Buy odroid! I love those damn boards. I’ve had a few over the years.
There is a site https://rpilocator.com/ that tracks all the usual resellers and alerts you if there is a stock drop somewhere, though they always sell out fast.
The different sellers like adafruit, pishop.us etc. usually have a "notify me when in stock" feature, so you get an email if they have a drop. Again though, they sell out fast.
At adafruit.com in particular, to buy a 4 or a zero W at all, you must already have an account on the site with 2 factor auth enabled. They have the idea that the 2fa will slow down bots but of course it won't necessarily. Anyway, you might sign up from them if you want to buy a board from there.
There are lots of alternative boards like odroid that you can consider, of course. And while the pi 400 is usually out of stock at adafruit, they refresh them pretty often and they don't sell out instantly. So if you ask for a notification you usually get one within a few days. This is frankly what I would do if I wanted a desktop rpi. It is even possible to extract the internal pcb (it is a long thin board, not the same form factor as the pi 4) if you want to embed it in something.
It is crazy how some new RPIs 4 get sold so fast and are barely produced, while old RPIs sell like new. I have 2 RPIs 3B+ unused, and 3 Zero; but I do not feel like selling.
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That's bull shit and a total rip off.
I believed the same thing too, but it does not make sense. A company usually wishes to produce as much as possible, sell as much as possible, and make profits as fast as possible (even though we are speaking about a non-profit educational foundation; but you get my point).
In this case however there is a product (Raspberry Pi 4) which was released in 2019 (this is more than 3 years ago), and now (in 2022) there is a huge shortage of Raspberry 4; so maybe they don't produce it not because they want to artificially increase price (which would hurt the brand), but because they do not have supply for some manufacturing components, or they have some very slow manufacturing process.
I can't see an artificial push to sell Raspberry Pi 400 either, because this one was released in 2020, and it's also hard to find in 2022 (out of stock). Besides, Raspberry Pi 400 is a actually Pi 4, with a completely different format to fit in a specially designed keyboard case for better cooling.
I can't stop wondering what is their problem; meanwhile organisation does not seem too open about why this shortage is happening.
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I thought the issue was getting enough of the SOC chips from Broadcom. I hope they will switch to another supplier for the pi 5 whenever that is. They have deep roots with Broadcom but Broadcom is a crappy company. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of the rpi pico / 2040, which is not made by Broadcom. We need for the pi zero or equivalent to become a commodity product, not a weird educational loss leader. The pi 4 is another matter and there are reasonable alternatives to it. This looks interesting:
https://www.pine64.org/2022/10/15/october-update-an-ox-no-bull/
They've spoken pretty extensively and openly about it - a blend of supply (as with everyone else on the planet, they're finding it hard to get enough silicon in) and demand (which went through the roof as soon as Covid hit and still hasn't really slowed down).
They're producing in the same volumes they always have - and can't ramp up because of a global chip shortage that everyone here knows about - but the demand devours every batch they can produce instantly.
There's no mystery or secret plan here; just a production capacity that can't expand, and a demand that's gone mad.
As for favouring educational purposes - that is PRECISELY what the entire company was founded to promote so frustrating as it is, good on them for focusing on their actual mission statement, rather than jacking up prices and making as much profit as they can selling to scalpers.
I had a little project I wanted to do with them and I realized it's essentially not meant to be bought in bulk or impossible to find even for a few concepts. Was going to be something we sent out to customers and then turned into a product after initial launch. I guess it's a good thing it didn't happen with everything else going on for us.
tbh there's a lot of alternate SBCs that are better designed for a lot of stuff and have a less stressed supply chain; the Pis are great for general purpose tinkering but these days unless you're looking to use Pi-specific hardware add-ons I'd be tempted to look elsewhere.
(frankly, for a lot of low-power hardware-y things I find the Pico just as good, cheaper and easier to solder
)
The eco systems around them are trash though. e.g. Thought I'd be OK with an Asus tinkerboard cause they're a big brand...nope software support is patchy & outdated
I never could get ZFS to work consistently with odroid HC2 . ZFS send/receives would hang
HC2 = XU4 with sata
Samsung Exynos5422 ARM Cortex??A15 Quad 2.0GHz/Cortex??A7 Quad 1.4GHz and JMicron JMS578 USB 3.0 to SATA Bridge with UAS
Lots of people are using odroid so that might be a reasonable choice. I wonder about pine64.
One day, I wanted a bunch of Pi's to experiment with a Pi cluster. I backordered 4 Raspberry Pi 2GB's off of Digikey. They were around $35 each if I recall correctly.
Half a year later, I completely forgot about them and randomly got a shipment notification from Digikey in my email. I had completely forgotten that I backordered those Raspberry Pi's
I ended up selling them for around $100/each because I kind of lost interest in the Pi cluster and wanted to wait for the shortage to end.
It's been around a year now, and I highly regret selling those Pi's because I actually need them again for some projects 🤣
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I'd imagine all of it will work somewhat, so its not like non-rasp stuff is unusable. For tasks like GPIO pins etc having something you can find guides etc for is a huge help though
Having just done this I can tell you selling them was the right move. 2gb for a k3s cluster would have been thin...4 and 8 are ok
I disagree. Anything is better than nothing at this point, even 2GB RPi.
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2gb doesn't leave much space to actually run stuff on the cluster after overheads. I literally just replaced a 2gb node with a 8gb in my cluster due to this.
If you're willing to buy a bundle you can still get 4/8 GB ones in stock. e.g.
https://www.okdo.com/p/okdo-renew-rpi-4b-4gb-class-a-with-camera-psu/
This. Even running Armbian on an Orange Pi is quite a seamless experience, but if you're trying to apply a RPi GPIO application or approach directly on an OPi it's a recipe for trouble. The OPi has the same capabilities but one needs the know how as to how to make the same functions happen on the other platform.