7 ms·

Pricing updates for Raspberry Pi

106 points by Ecio78 15y ago

kennywinker 15y ago
I understand their reasons for doing this, and I appreciate their transparency... but the way raspberry pi has gone about selling their product is frustrating. I just want to hand over my money and get one as soon as I can possible have one. I don't want to keep having to check back and sign up for mailing lists and register my interest etc. etc. etc. The sooner I can place an order and have my credit card charged, the sooner I can stop thinking about it and be pleasantly surprised when it arrives on my doorstep.
- corin_ 15y ago
  > the way raspberry pi has gone about selling their product is frustrating Would you rather they not let anyone buy them until they had more than enough to sell to absolutely everyone who might want one? Or is there a third option that they should have taken?
  - pieter 15y ago
    The other option would be directly selling them themselves, instead of being at the mercy of a few existing retailers. I'm not sure that would go smoother, but at least you wouldn't have to go to each retailer and sign up for their lists or having to check their sites which one will get a new batch first. (EDIT: I'm not saying I would think that's a good idea, but I think that's what the GP meant)
    - spurgu 15y ago
      Well, the way it's done now, once evertyhing gets rolling there'll be enough Pi's for everyone. I can appreciate using experienced distributors instead of potentially facing much larger problems and delays. I agree it's not the smoothest of launches but from what I hear it's not much easier to get your hands on a new Apple device..
    - gaius 15y ago
      ... In which case they would cost more to cover the cost of setting up a logistics operation from scratch.
    - corin_ 15y ago
      The speed benefit of not having to take a guess on one of two distributors would be more than wiped out by the delays caused by rPi having to do it all themselves, and would likely make it harder for them to meet their price targets. And regardless, even if you ignore the downsides, at the very best all it would do is make the way a little easier, it doesn't solve the op's problem of having to wait before buying.
    - DanBC 15y ago
      In the future you will be able to buy directly form the few existing retailers. The only reason that you can't now is because they sold all their product. Both RS and Farnell are pretty large distributors (worldwide, not just UK) and should be able to easily meet demand. Only problem is confusion about selling to individuals not businesses, but that'll get solved. EDIT: The foundation is a non-profit charity, where everyone involved has other jobs. That sounds sub-optimal for receiving orders, processing them, shipping them, and handling returns. It's much better that they've outsourced that to companies who are in business to sell stuff.
    - ocdprogrammer 15y ago
      RS Components only, has 200.000 applications of interest (and growing at 10/minute). Farnell may be close to this number too. I can easily guess that you never ever tried to sell ~400.000 products and you have no ideea about what this means logistically. If they tried to sell them themselves, It would have taken years to get a warehouse, employ and train enough people to handle those orders, invest in warehousing equipment, management etc. Although I don't like to wait, I think they handled it rather well until now. The best thing they can do from now on is to make sure that RS and Farnell don't remain the only 2 channels of distribution.
    - polshaw 15y ago
      I would have preferred they sold directly. It is not so much the logistics, but that they have lost control. And lets not pretend that these companies are doing it for love-- they are taking money that could have gone to the charity. On the launch they had no idea one of the retailers was only going to take a statement of interest. I'm still not sure what's going on at RS. The servers were woefully under-prepared-- if the Pi folks were running it they could have thrown it up on AWS for an hour and then thrown up a static 'sold out' page. No faffing around, no attempting to register on a server that was being DDOSed. This announcement shows they don't seem to have control of their pricing either. It's not the end of the world, but this seems like something they should be in control of. As for the logistics side, I don't actually see why they couldn't have handled it themselves. They already had a payment processor set up for badge sales. I'm pretty sure 10,000 rPi's, 10,000 padded envelopes, and a printer could easily fit in almost any room. So all they would have to do is sort things out with a shipping agent, and hire a few people to pack them. IIRC, Amazon offer this service (send them boxes of something and they'll distribute it) so they could have even avoided this and still retained more control.
  - ajross 15y ago
    Um, what? They could backorder them like everyone else does. Advertise a product and price. Accept orders at that price for existing stock and scheduled deliveries. And repeat that process as more become available. As an optimization, allow a fixed-sized queue of "pre-orders" at the same price. Though you have to be careful with this because you're selling things you aren't guaranteed to get. Amazon can cover the losses from mistakes here, small vendors can't.
  - RobertKohr 15y ago
    They should have charged more. It is obvious that demand was way more than supply. When demand is too high, you raise prices to decrease demand to match with your supply. When you increase supply you can lower prices to have demand match it. In the long run they want to make it so everyone can have one for cheap, but really they don't have the infrastructure to do that. By selling at a higher price they can use the extra money to build out that infrastructure and then lower prices.
    - corin_ 15y ago
      So should they have announced higher prices recently and had to face all the "knew they couldn't do it at the prices they promised, was all nonsense!" opinions? Or should they have never announced their real prices, and not got so much good press?
- wr1472 15y ago
  consumerism in all its glory.
  - freehunter 15y ago
    In what way is this consumerism? Consumerism is commonly used as a pejorative to refer to entitled people buying things they don't need. Raspberry Pi is not a consumer product, it's a niche project. This isn't a case of people trampling each other to buy an iPad so they can buy more apps and iTunes music. People want these so they can create. That's not consumerism.
    - joezydeco 15y ago
      Raspberry Pi borders on consumerism. If people want to capital-C Create, they have many other options that are already available, shipping, and well documented. Take your pick. Basic Stamp, TI USB keys, Arduino, Beagle, Beaglebone, Panda, OpenWRT, Chumby, Sparkfun boards, Adafruit boards, $50 eBay laptops, all the plug computers, etc etc etc. Read hackaday.com for an hour if you want to see Creation. Raspberry Pi is cheap(er) and has an HDMI port on it. The majority of the "creation" I've seen from the clamor is everyone wanting to run XBMC on it and not much else.
      - freehunter 15y ago
        Well with that classification,buying anything is consumerism. Wanting an Arduino is consumerism because the majority of people want to buy them and follow a tutorial to make something. The idea is people are doing something on their own, rather than buying something preinstalled and just plugging it in. Consumerism refers to buying something that can only lead to further purchases. An iPad is consumerism. A Kindle Fire is consumerism. An MP3 player is consumerism. A Raspberry Pi comes with nothing extra and entices you to buy nothing extra. The simple act of installing XBMC (since it doesn't come preinstalled, nothing comes preinstalled) and having a large install base on these devices is actively helping two non-profits and one open-source group. Some people want a Raspberry Pi to consume media. That doesn't make Rasperry Pi a consumerist product.
dsr_ 15y ago
I am pleasantly surprised that this didn't turn out to be an unexpected price increase.
- zrgiu_ 15y ago
  me too. Maybe the op can change the title to also include the "good news!" part. When I first saw the title I was actually expecting some bad news.
  - Ecio78 15y ago
    it looks like I can't edit it, dont know why..
- jff 15y ago
  Me too... I came in wondering, "Ok, how have things been screwed up yet again?". Glad to see it's something positive.
- obtu 15y ago
  It's a significant decrease here. And RS's fixed world-wide pricing is a guarantee the prices of both retailers will be reasonable everywhere.
noonespecial 15y ago
Yeah. A bit disappointing. Its been weeks since the launch, and the only thing I can do is register my interest in a product that, even when available here in the USA is coming very close to being double the magic $25 I was hoping for(1). I somewhat infamously predicted last December that if the RasPi had trouble shipping and didn't deliver on the crazy low price that made it nearly disposable that the magic could be lost. It seems to me that they are one "Beaglebone" clone (shaving an Andy Jackson off the price) away from irrelevance. In many ways, the 'bone is already way ahead with "cape" addons and a vibrant community. Now is the time for the foundation to fight relentlessly for their core principles. Cheap, open, available. I want to believe. (1) I am aware that only B is for sale and the $25 is for A which should become available at some point.
- beagle3 15y ago
  > when available here in the USA is coming very close to being double the magic $25 I was hoping for(1). You were expecting a free-shipping model A, and instead have to pay for shipment (the horror!) and only have the model B available (exactly as they say). If there's any problem here, it lies with your expectations. You can wait till the Model A becomes available. You can also arrange for people at your hackerspace to order 100 together to make the shipping cost negligible. Other than Apple, RP seems to be as good or better at delivering on their promises as any other vendor. And apple mostly deliver on their promises because they hardly ever make any.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    > You can also arrange for people at your hackerspace to order 100 together to make the shipping cost negligible Out of interest, is this currently possible with their one-per-person restriction? If not, would be nice if there was a way for people to group together and get one-each, all in a single shipment.
    - beagle3 15y ago
      I do not know, but I suspect their one-per-person restriction is "one per person, unless you can convince us that you are not a scalper, and plan to order > 100 to make our time checking out your explanation worth its while". I suspect if a well known hackerspace (SF Noisebridge, NYC Resistor, PumpStation One, Nottinghack) made such a request, they could get it.
ars 15y ago
I really wish it had VGA output, without that it's useless to me since I have no spare monitors to connect to it.
- polshaw 15y ago
  Since all TVs/Monitors/Projectors have had HDMI for some years now, i think it was a wise choice. IIRC there is still composite out for those stuck with only analogue connections.
- augustl 15y ago
  HDMI => DVI => VGA should work, no? A lot of adapters, but at least you'll get a signal out of it.
  - j_s 15y ago
    HDMI => DVI would be enough for every monitor I've owned in the past 5 years.
  - ars 15y ago
    I checked - those adapters cost more than the Raspberry Pi! Around $50. The cheap cables you may be thinking of require the device to output a VGA signal.
    - linker3000 15y ago
      Not ideal, but you can get composite (CVBS) to VGA converters for about £15 on eBay.
  - jdub 15y ago
    The HDMI socket on the Pi carries a digital signal only.
- runeks 15y ago
  The thing is the digital-to-analog converter would simply add too much cost to the device. A lot of these kinds of boards don't include VGA output because analog is (relatively) expensive, compared to digital.
chj 15y ago
any one actually lay hands on this thing?
franze 15y ago
> Currently we are restricted in selling to private individuals in Austria only. anybody knows why that's the case?
itmag 15y ago
I'm seeing this Raspberry Pi meme on HN a lot lately so I guess I should look into it? What kind of cool things will I be able to do with it exactly?
- JshWright 15y ago
  I'm confused by your use of the word 'meme.' A meme is generally some sort of fairly abstract thing (e.g. a funny picture of a cat with various witty statements superimposed on it). This, on the other hand, is a physical product, so I'm not sure how it could qualify as a 'meme.'
- itmag 15y ago
  Haters be downvotin' instead of answering my honest question. So far I know of 0 cool uses for a Raspberry Pi. I don't have time to research every new HN trend in detail either. That's why I ask for a summary of what this thing can do for me.
  - polshaw 15y ago
    It's a tiny, low power, low cost computer. The uses are almost infinite.
  - angersock 15y ago
    It's a cute toy for running Linux. You can play Quake 3 on it. Other than that, it might be useful for teaching programming...?
  - nitrogen 15y ago
    I don't have time to research every new HN trend in detail either. So in your laziness, you expect us to do it for you?
    - itmag 15y ago
      http://raspberrypihacks.com/raspberry-pi-hacks/some-of-the-best-raspberry-pi-ideas-and-uses-ive-seen-so-far/ http://raspberrypihacks.com/raspberry-pi-hacks/some-of-the-b...
SandersAK 15y ago
I'm confused. I just put in a pre-order for three of these via Newark. Has that changed?

106 points by Ecio78 15y ago

I understand their reasons for doing this, and I appreciate their transparency... but the way raspberry pi has gone about selling their product is frustrating. I just want to hand over my money and get one as soon as I can possible have one. I don't want to keep having to check back and sign up for mailing lists and register my interest etc. etc. etc. The sooner I can place an order and have my credit card charged, the sooner I can stop thinking about it and be pleasantly surprised when it arrives on my doorstep.

corin_ 15y ago
> the way raspberry pi has gone about selling their product is frustrating Would you rather they not let anyone buy them until they had more than enough to sell to absolutely everyone who might want one? Or is there a third option that they should have taken?
- pieter 15y ago
  The other option would be directly selling them themselves, instead of being at the mercy of a few existing retailers. I'm not sure that would go smoother, but at least you wouldn't have to go to each retailer and sign up for their lists or having to check their sites which one will get a new batch first. (EDIT: I'm not saying I would think that's a good idea, but I think that's what the GP meant)
  - spurgu 15y ago
    Well, the way it's done now, once evertyhing gets rolling there'll be enough Pi's for everyone. I can appreciate using experienced distributors instead of potentially facing much larger problems and delays. I agree it's not the smoothest of launches but from what I hear it's not much easier to get your hands on a new Apple device..
  - gaius 15y ago
    ... In which case they would cost more to cover the cost of setting up a logistics operation from scratch.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    The speed benefit of not having to take a guess on one of two distributors would be more than wiped out by the delays caused by rPi having to do it all themselves, and would likely make it harder for them to meet their price targets. And regardless, even if you ignore the downsides, at the very best all it would do is make the way a little easier, it doesn't solve the op's problem of having to wait before buying.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    In the future you will be able to buy directly form the few existing retailers. The only reason that you can't now is because they sold all their product. Both RS and Farnell are pretty large distributors (worldwide, not just UK) and should be able to easily meet demand. Only problem is confusion about selling to individuals not businesses, but that'll get solved. EDIT: The foundation is a non-profit charity, where everyone involved has other jobs. That sounds sub-optimal for receiving orders, processing them, shipping them, and handling returns. It's much better that they've outsourced that to companies who are in business to sell stuff.
  - ocdprogrammer 15y ago
    RS Components only, has 200.000 applications of interest (and growing at 10/minute). Farnell may be close to this number too. I can easily guess that you never ever tried to sell ~400.000 products and you have no ideea about what this means logistically. If they tried to sell them themselves, It would have taken years to get a warehouse, employ and train enough people to handle those orders, invest in warehousing equipment, management etc. Although I don't like to wait, I think they handled it rather well until now. The best thing they can do from now on is to make sure that RS and Farnell don't remain the only 2 channels of distribution.
  - polshaw 15y ago
    I would have preferred they sold directly. It is not so much the logistics, but that they have lost control. And lets not pretend that these companies are doing it for love-- they are taking money that could have gone to the charity. On the launch they had no idea one of the retailers was only going to take a statement of interest. I'm still not sure what's going on at RS. The servers were woefully under-prepared-- if the Pi folks were running it they could have thrown it up on AWS for an hour and then thrown up a static 'sold out' page. No faffing around, no attempting to register on a server that was being DDOSed. This announcement shows they don't seem to have control of their pricing either. It's not the end of the world, but this seems like something they should be in control of. As for the logistics side, I don't actually see why they couldn't have handled it themselves. They already had a payment processor set up for badge sales. I'm pretty sure 10,000 rPi's, 10,000 padded envelopes, and a printer could easily fit in almost any room. So all they would have to do is sort things out with a shipping agent, and hire a few people to pack them. IIRC, Amazon offer this service (send them boxes of something and they'll distribute it) so they could have even avoided this and still retained more control.
- ajross 15y ago
  Um, what? They could backorder them like everyone else does. Advertise a product and price. Accept orders at that price for existing stock and scheduled deliveries. And repeat that process as more become available. As an optimization, allow a fixed-sized queue of "pre-orders" at the same price. Though you have to be careful with this because you're selling things you aren't guaranteed to get. Amazon can cover the losses from mistakes here, small vendors can't.
- RobertKohr 15y ago
  They should have charged more. It is obvious that demand was way more than supply. When demand is too high, you raise prices to decrease demand to match with your supply. When you increase supply you can lower prices to have demand match it. In the long run they want to make it so everyone can have one for cheap, but really they don't have the infrastructure to do that. By selling at a higher price they can use the extra money to build out that infrastructure and then lower prices.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    So should they have announced higher prices recently and had to face all the "knew they couldn't do it at the prices they promised, was all nonsense!" opinions? Or should they have never announced their real prices, and not got so much good press?
wr1472 15y ago
consumerism in all its glory.
- freehunter 15y ago
  In what way is this consumerism? Consumerism is commonly used as a pejorative to refer to entitled people buying things they don't need. Raspberry Pi is not a consumer product, it's a niche project. This isn't a case of people trampling each other to buy an iPad so they can buy more apps and iTunes music. People want these so they can create. That's not consumerism.
  - joezydeco 15y ago
    Raspberry Pi borders on consumerism. If people want to capital-C Create, they have many other options that are already available, shipping, and well documented. Take your pick. Basic Stamp, TI USB keys, Arduino, Beagle, Beaglebone, Panda, OpenWRT, Chumby, Sparkfun boards, Adafruit boards, $50 eBay laptops, all the plug computers, etc etc etc. Read hackaday.com for an hour if you want to see Creation. Raspberry Pi is cheap(er) and has an HDMI port on it. The majority of the "creation" I've seen from the clamor is everyone wanting to run XBMC on it and not much else.
    - freehunter 15y ago
      Well with that classification,buying anything is consumerism. Wanting an Arduino is consumerism because the majority of people want to buy them and follow a tutorial to make something. The idea is people are doing something on their own, rather than buying something preinstalled and just plugging it in. Consumerism refers to buying something that can only lead to further purchases. An iPad is consumerism. A Kindle Fire is consumerism. An MP3 player is consumerism. A Raspberry Pi comes with nothing extra and entices you to buy nothing extra. The simple act of installing XBMC (since it doesn't come preinstalled, nothing comes preinstalled) and having a large install base on these devices is actively helping two non-profits and one open-source group. Some people want a Raspberry Pi to consume media. That doesn't make Rasperry Pi a consumerist product.

dsr_ 15y ago

I am pleasantly surprised that this didn't turn out to be an unexpected price increase.

zrgiu_ 15y ago
me too. Maybe the op can change the title to also include the "good news!" part. When I first saw the title I was actually expecting some bad news.
- Ecio78 15y ago
  it looks like I can't edit it, dont know why..
jff 15y ago
Me too... I came in wondering, "Ok, how have things been screwed up yet again?". Glad to see it's something positive.
obtu 15y ago
It's a significant decrease here. And RS's fixed world-wide pricing is a guarantee the prices of both retailers will be reasonable everywhere.

noonespecial 15y ago

Yeah. A bit disappointing. Its been weeks since the launch, and the only thing I can do is register my interest in a product that, even when available here in the USA is coming very close to being double the magic $25 I was hoping for(1). I somewhat infamously predicted last December that if the RasPi had trouble shipping and didn't deliver on the crazy low price that made it nearly disposable that the magic could be lost. It seems to me that they are one "Beaglebone" clone (shaving an Andy Jackson off the price) away from irrelevance. In many ways, the 'bone is already way ahead with "cape" addons and a vibrant community. Now is the time for the foundation to fight relentlessly for their core principles. Cheap, open, available. I want to believe. (1) I am aware that only B is for sale and the $25 is for A which should become available at some point.

beagle3 15y ago
> when available here in the USA is coming very close to being double the magic $25 I was hoping for(1). You were expecting a free-shipping model A, and instead have to pay for shipment (the horror!) and only have the model B available (exactly as they say). If there's any problem here, it lies with your expectations. You can wait till the Model A becomes available. You can also arrange for people at your hackerspace to order 100 together to make the shipping cost negligible. Other than Apple, RP seems to be as good or better at delivering on their promises as any other vendor. And apple mostly deliver on their promises because they hardly ever make any.
- corin_ 15y ago
  > You can also arrange for people at your hackerspace to order 100 together to make the shipping cost negligible Out of interest, is this currently possible with their one-per-person restriction? If not, would be nice if there was a way for people to group together and get one-each, all in a single shipment.
  - beagle3 15y ago
    I do not know, but I suspect their one-per-person restriction is "one per person, unless you can convince us that you are not a scalper, and plan to order > 100 to make our time checking out your explanation worth its while". I suspect if a well known hackerspace (SF Noisebridge, NYC Resistor, PumpStation One, Nottinghack) made such a request, they could get it.

ars 15y ago

I really wish it had VGA output, without that it's useless to me since I have no spare monitors to connect to it.

polshaw 15y ago
Since all TVs/Monitors/Projectors have had HDMI for some years now, i think it was a wise choice. IIRC there is still composite out for those stuck with only analogue connections.
augustl 15y ago
HDMI => DVI => VGA should work, no? A lot of adapters, but at least you'll get a signal out of it.
- j_s 15y ago
  HDMI => DVI would be enough for every monitor I've owned in the past 5 years.
- ars 15y ago
  I checked - those adapters cost more than the Raspberry Pi! Around $50. The cheap cables you may be thinking of require the device to output a VGA signal.
  - linker3000 15y ago
    Not ideal, but you can get composite (CVBS) to VGA converters for about £15 on eBay.
- jdub 15y ago
  The HDMI socket on the Pi carries a digital signal only.
runeks 15y ago
The thing is the digital-to-analog converter would simply add too much cost to the device. A lot of these kinds of boards don't include VGA output because analog is (relatively) expensive, compared to digital.

chj 15y ago

any one actually lay hands on this thing?

franze 15y ago

> Currently we are restricted in selling to private individuals in Austria only. anybody knows why that's the case?

itmag 15y ago

I'm seeing this Raspberry Pi meme on HN a lot lately so I guess I should look into it? What kind of cool things will I be able to do with it exactly?

JshWright 15y ago
I'm confused by your use of the word 'meme.' A meme is generally some sort of fairly abstract thing (e.g. a funny picture of a cat with various witty statements superimposed on it). This, on the other hand, is a physical product, so I'm not sure how it could qualify as a 'meme.'
itmag 15y ago
Haters be downvotin' instead of answering my honest question. So far I know of 0 cool uses for a Raspberry Pi. I don't have time to research every new HN trend in detail either. That's why I ask for a summary of what this thing can do for me.
- polshaw 15y ago
  It's a tiny, low power, low cost computer. The uses are almost infinite.
- angersock 15y ago
  It's a cute toy for running Linux. You can play Quake 3 on it. Other than that, it might be useful for teaching programming...?
- nitrogen 15y ago
  I don't have time to research every new HN trend in detail either. So in your laziness, you expect us to do it for you?
  - itmag 15y ago
    http://raspberrypihacks.com/raspberry-pi-hacks/some-of-the-best-raspberry-pi-ideas-and-uses-ive-seen-so-far/ http://raspberrypihacks.com/raspberry-pi-hacks/some-of-the-b...

SandersAK 15y ago

I'm confused. I just put in a pre-order for three of these via Newark. Has that changed?