5 ms·

One thing which hasn't been great in all this is the communication from the Pi Foundation itself. I've been struggling to buy them for months, the only real pub

by giobox 4y ago

One thing which hasn't been great in all this is the communication from the Pi Foundation itself. I've been struggling to buy them for months, the only real public communication on the matter from them has been that blog post in April and this post by Jeff. This is not a great way to communicate with the user base on a tough issue etc. The official blog is just marketing fluff for the most part, almost never mentioning the fact you haven't been able to easily obtain one for over six months. If what Eben told Jeff is the case, why not tell everyone on the blog, or some other public channel? "Ringing up Eben" is not an option for most of us. I also think with prioritizing commercial customers, we should drop the ruse that this thing is an educational board. I honestly don't think education has been a majority of users for a long time, but perhaps i'm grossly mistaken here. > https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/

esskay 4y ago
I think what makes it worse is the "No, piss off" attitude of their forum team when anyone asks for an update, followed by locking the thread.
- sounds 4y ago
  In all fairness, a forum thread would collect a bunch of anecdata but is not an official way to request a sale. If the Raspberri Pi foundation doesn't want to sell you their product, there's no way you can force them to sell you one. That there are no blog posts probably just means that some exec from Broadcom told Eben not to post anything.
- shuuv4678igt 4y ago
  what do you all expect from a company that markets as the most open platform that is full of closed firmware and NDAs?
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    Everything is a tradeoff. They get parts for cheap from certain manufacturers. Those have proprietary firmware that you and I can't have the source code to. Everything else is open source. For me, that's fine. It lets me buy them for much cheaper. You could probably design your own board and find completely open source hardware and software yourself, but I doubt if there's much profit in it. If you have a better path and can keep the board as cheap as it is then you should probably get in touch with their engineers.
Dalewyn 4y ago
>we should drop the ruse that this thing is an educational board. rPi stopped feeling like educational material when they moved on from whatever low price they were at the beginning. You are not going to convince me that a computer selling for $150~300 each or whatever it is nowadays is "for education". An educational computer is something like an Arduino board, which apparently sells for $25~50 currently from some quick checking. If I'm dropping two or three Franklins on a computer, I'd rather just get an older Intel NUC or something so I can take advantage of the much larger and capable Windows and Linux ecosystems.
- bri3d 4y ago
  The base price of the Pi has remained at $35, they just aren't possible to get. Regardless, the Pi Foundation / Pi Trading Company / whatever weird part of the Pi Empire actually sells them haven't raised the base price version-over-version.
  - voldacar 4y ago
    If they aren't possible to get for that price, then that isn't actually the price.
    - masukomi 4y ago
      sure, but it's like tickets at a concert. They sell most of them for $30. There's nothing they can do to prevent scalpers from buying them and jacking up the price 10x, but that doesn't make it the performer's fault you can only buy them for $300. yes, it sucks, but the performers (and the Pi makers) did the best they could to offer them to folks at a cheap price.
      - bri3d 4y ago
        Eh - I suppose with the music analogy it's more like the Pi folks chose to play arenas instead of festivals, and keep putting corporate box seat customers on the guest list ahead of GA attendees. I think there's some blame here, I just also think it's flat-out incorrect to claim that Pi prices have increased.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
What infuriates me is Ebon selling himself as some sort of hero, claiming that they're prioritizing things so that "people don't lose their jobs." How brave and noble of him, right? If he stopped supplying OEMs, nobody would lose their jobs. The opposite, in fact. More engineering staff and contractors and consultants would get work because these companies would have to re-develop their products to use an in-house SBC or any of the hundreds of industrial SBCs out there. Everyone else can't do that. Your average hobbyist can't just call up an industrial SBC company and buy. That was the whole point behind the Pi (well, the whole point was using up shitty SoCs that Broadcom hadn't been able to sell, but that's beside the point.) What's really going on is that Ebon is prioritizing large OEMs who use Pis because they don't want to be bothered spending R&D to develop their own embedded system. Meanwhile he's fucking over every small guy. All the retailers who have lost all that revenue and associated accessory sales? Fucked. What about their livelihoods? What about the logistics people they employed? They apparently can all get fucked. All the non-profits (like libraries, hackerspaces, schools, etc) who may have secured budget and grant money for Pi-based programs that now cannot be spent? Fucked. rarely can money secured for purpose A be diverted to purpose B, and more often than not, you simply lose the funding entirely and you lose that amount of money from next year's budget, too. How about the thousands of cottage industry small entrepreneurs making a living off Pi-based products they've developed? Fucked. How about all the researchers, using Pis for data collection and controlling experiments? Fucked. How about all the people who had home or business automation who need to replace a damaged or fried Pi? Fucked. But thank god we're saving jobs at those large corporations who went with Pis because it was a cost-saving measure. The Pi Foundation isn't even particularly competent. Every single Pi model has had problems, and the Pi 4 had basic, obvious-within-minutes-to-anyone-who-tried-to-use-it problems with power because the Pi foundation fucked up their USB-PD implementation. Ebon says they're making 6M Pi's a year but it's months between any US supplier getting Pis, which means he's doing way more than "prioritizing OEMs."
- PcChip 4y ago
  Sounds like he wants to keep the OEMs in business because they will keep him in business
- nine_k 4y ago

by giobox 4y ago

esskay 4y ago

I think what makes it worse is the "No, piss off" attitude of their forum team when anyone asks for an update, followed by locking the thread.

sounds 4y ago
In all fairness, a forum thread would collect a bunch of anecdata but is not an official way to request a sale. If the Raspberri Pi foundation doesn't want to sell you their product, there's no way you can force them to sell you one. That there are no blog posts probably just means that some exec from Broadcom told Eben not to post anything.
shuuv4678igt 4y ago
what do you all expect from a company that markets as the most open platform that is full of closed firmware and NDAs?
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Everything is a tradeoff. They get parts for cheap from certain manufacturers. Those have proprietary firmware that you and I can't have the source code to. Everything else is open source. For me, that's fine. It lets me buy them for much cheaper. You could probably design your own board and find completely open source hardware and software yourself, but I doubt if there's much profit in it. If you have a better path and can keep the board as cheap as it is then you should probably get in touch with their engineers.

Dalewyn 4y ago

>we should drop the ruse that this thing is an educational board. rPi stopped feeling like educational material when they moved on from whatever low price they were at the beginning. You are not going to convince me that a computer selling for $150~300 each or whatever it is nowadays is "for education". An educational computer is something like an Arduino board, which apparently sells for $25~50 currently from some quick checking. If I'm dropping two or three Franklins on a computer, I'd rather just get an older Intel NUC or something so I can take advantage of the much larger and capable Windows and Linux ecosystems.

bri3d 4y ago
The base price of the Pi has remained at $35, they just aren't possible to get. Regardless, the Pi Foundation / Pi Trading Company / whatever weird part of the Pi Empire actually sells them haven't raised the base price version-over-version.
- voldacar 4y ago
  If they aren't possible to get for that price, then that isn't actually the price.
  - masukomi 4y ago
    sure, but it's like tickets at a concert. They sell most of them for $30. There's nothing they can do to prevent scalpers from buying them and jacking up the price 10x, but that doesn't make it the performer's fault you can only buy them for $300. yes, it sucks, but the performers (and the Pi makers) did the best they could to offer them to folks at a cheap price.
    - bri3d 4y ago
      Eh - I suppose with the music analogy it's more like the Pi folks chose to play arenas instead of festivals, and keep putting corporate box seat customers on the guest list ahead of GA attendees. I think there's some blame here, I just also think it's flat-out incorrect to claim that Pi prices have increased.

KennyBlanken 4y ago

What infuriates me is Ebon selling himself as some sort of hero, claiming that they're prioritizing things so that "people don't lose their jobs." How brave and noble of him, right? If he stopped supplying OEMs, nobody would lose their jobs. The opposite, in fact. More engineering staff and contractors and consultants would get work because these companies would have to re-develop their products to use an in-house SBC or any of the hundreds of industrial SBCs out there. Everyone else can't do that. Your average hobbyist can't just call up an industrial SBC company and buy. That was the whole point behind the Pi (well, the whole point was using up shitty SoCs that Broadcom hadn't been able to sell, but that's beside the point.) What's really going on is that Ebon is prioritizing large OEMs who use Pis because they don't want to be bothered spending R&D to develop their own embedded system. Meanwhile he's fucking over every small guy. All the retailers who have lost all that revenue and associated accessory sales? Fucked. What about their livelihoods? What about the logistics people they employed? They apparently can all get fucked. All the non-profits (like libraries, hackerspaces, schools, etc) who may have secured budget and grant money for Pi-based programs that now cannot be spent? Fucked. rarely can money secured for purpose A be diverted to purpose B, and more often than not, you simply lose the funding entirely and you lose that amount of money from next year's budget, too. How about the thousands of cottage industry small entrepreneurs making a living off Pi-based products they've developed? Fucked. How about all the researchers, using Pis for data collection and controlling experiments? Fucked. How about all the people who had home or business automation who need to replace a damaged or fried Pi? Fucked. But thank god we're saving jobs at those large corporations who went with Pis because it was a cost-saving measure. The Pi Foundation isn't even particularly competent. Every single Pi model has had problems, and the Pi 4 had basic, obvious-within-minutes-to-anyone-who-tried-to-use-it problems with power because the Pi foundation fucked up their USB-PD implementation. Ebon says they're making 6M Pi's a year but it's months between any US supplier getting Pis, which means he's doing way more than "prioritizing OEMs."

PcChip 4y ago
Sounds like he wants to keep the OEMs in business because they will keep him in business
nine_k 4y ago