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To be fair, the RasPi folks are saying that if you email their sales department directly they do have some stock allocated to ship out to good causes. They are
by easygenes 4y ago
To be fair, the RasPi folks are saying that if you email their sales department directly they do have some stock allocated to ship out to good causes. They are simply beholden to their OEM contracts for most of what is getting produced currently.
I doubt anyone foresaw that RasPi would be forced to ship less than 400k units across all their models monthly. The chip shortage is catching everyone by surprise, and we’re probably lucky RasPi is considered important enough to get a regular allocation of their BoM at all, given the low margins they’re operating on.
As I understand it, there are quite a few OEMs who have staff allocated to improving the Pi ecosystem as well, so it’s not like the educational and hobbyist markets gain nothing from their OEM engagements. RasPi has become the de-facto standard for the, “I need a cheap card that can run Linux in under 10 watts,” market in large part because of its robust support.