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That really gets on my tits that, people buying a product and selling it for a much higher price. I'm all for supply and demand but £100 - £150 more than the re

That really gets on my tits that, people buying a product and selling it for a much higher price. I'm all for supply and demand but £100 - £150 more than the retail price is pathetic! If they didn't want them in the first place they shouldn't buy them!

getsat 15y ago
You'll see this same behavior anywhere demand greatly exceeds supply. I know I'll never see a Raspberry Pi in real life because they refuse to meet demand for whatever reason, so it doesn't really bother me.
- tudorw 15y ago
  I am not sure they are refusing, I think they know that to grow a large company takes time, and this is the first version of the first device that is available at scale. And as to the taking advantage, well, none of these people have large quantities, one I believe is doing it for charity, the others, sure, a bit of opportunism, but hey, fortune favours the brave, it was not their fault there is high demand, and ultimately high demand is a good thing for Pi and us :)
  - sounds 15y ago
    Although it's unfortunate that some people will not get their Pi, the reality of a lack of supply (just scaling up, like you said) leads the market to do the most efficient thing: Some customers are willing to pay the higher price. If nobody will buy at that high of a markup, you can be sure the prices will come down. So for whatever reason, those who feel it's worth the extra money can get theirs first. Since this is such an inexpensive device, it's certain to become widespread. This price bump will be short lived.
- goatforce5 15y ago
  They say they'll ship 100,000 units in the next 10 or so weeks. How are they refusing to meet demand?
- excuse-me 15y ago
  Without making excuses - 'they' are a couple of people doing this on their own time/money. It's like complaining that Linus didn't invest in ramping up Linux to run on more platforms in 1991. Yes they made some mistakes, not realising that they wouldn't be able to handle distribution and handing it off to Farnell/RS at the last minute = well you live and learn Perhaps a silicon valley attitude company would have made a bigger splash, pre-sold the first 10,000 for $100 or done a kickstarter appeal to raise $1M and had an initial run of 100K units. Perhaps someone with west coast connections would have been able to get a few $M from someone at Google/Ebay/Facebook. In my experience trying to get $M from charity foundations for something like this would take years and cost more in marketing than it cost to actually do it - ask the OLPC guys. Funnily enough, their aim was to copy the success of the original BBC micro (= the UK equivalent to the Apple II). Back in the 80s when we actually made things - industry could get government loans to tool up to build products, now we just hand out trillions to banks.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
From a business perspective it just means they (the Raspberry Pi folks) didn't make all the money that is to be earned by these boards. So if you walk by a table and it has neatly stacked 5 pound notes on it, and it says "Free Money" are you going to get angry at someone for going up to the table and picking up a stack or three? No of course not. Now you could argue that the R/Pi folks could have gotten better funding for their causes by taking that money, and they did some of that with the initial 'alpha run' auction they did, but when the wave passes it will be irrelevant. Now I personally would have sold them for a bit more (we've had lots of conversations on HN about it) and used the extra to fund a small tech support team to keep the problem reports manageable and turn around community discoveries and work arounds for problems into active out reach, but that is just me. There are lots of factories in China which could make 250,000 of these a day and not blink if they had the parts so I'm not concerned that supply will always be this tight.

getsat 15y ago

You'll see this same behavior anywhere demand greatly exceeds supply. I know I'll never see a Raspberry Pi in real life because they refuse to meet demand for whatever reason, so it doesn't really bother me.

tudorw 15y ago
I am not sure they are refusing, I think they know that to grow a large company takes time, and this is the first version of the first device that is available at scale. And as to the taking advantage, well, none of these people have large quantities, one I believe is doing it for charity, the others, sure, a bit of opportunism, but hey, fortune favours the brave, it was not their fault there is high demand, and ultimately high demand is a good thing for Pi and us :)
- sounds 15y ago
  Although it's unfortunate that some people will not get their Pi, the reality of a lack of supply (just scaling up, like you said) leads the market to do the most efficient thing: Some customers are willing to pay the higher price. If nobody will buy at that high of a markup, you can be sure the prices will come down. So for whatever reason, those who feel it's worth the extra money can get theirs first. Since this is such an inexpensive device, it's certain to become widespread. This price bump will be short lived.
goatforce5 15y ago
They say they'll ship 100,000 units in the next 10 or so weeks. How are they refusing to meet demand?
excuse-me 15y ago
Without making excuses - 'they' are a couple of people doing this on their own time/money. It's like complaining that Linus didn't invest in ramping up Linux to run on more platforms in 1991. Yes they made some mistakes, not realising that they wouldn't be able to handle distribution and handing it off to Farnell/RS at the last minute = well you live and learn Perhaps a silicon valley attitude company would have made a bigger splash, pre-sold the first 10,000 for $100 or done a kickstarter appeal to raise $1M and had an initial run of 100K units. Perhaps someone with west coast connections would have been able to get a few $M from someone at Google/Ebay/Facebook. In my experience trying to get $M from charity foundations for something like this would take years and cost more in marketing than it cost to actually do it - ask the OLPC guys. Funnily enough, their aim was to copy the success of the original BBC micro (= the UK equivalent to the Apple II). Back in the 80s when we actually made things - industry could get government loans to tool up to build products, now we just hand out trillions to banks.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

From a business perspective it just means they (the Raspberry Pi folks) didn't make all the money that is to be earned by these boards. So if you walk by a table and it has neatly stacked 5 pound notes on it, and it says "Free Money" are you going to get angry at someone for going up to the table and picking up a stack or three? No of course not. Now you could argue that the R/Pi folks could have gotten better funding for their causes by taking that money, and they did some of that with the initial 'alpha run' auction they did, but when the wave passes it will be irrelevant. Now I personally would have sold them for a bit more (we've had lots of conversations on HN about it) and used the extra to fund a small tech support team to keep the problem reports manageable and turn around community discoveries and work arounds for problems into active out reach, but that is just me. There are lots of factories in China which could make 250,000 of these a day and not blink if they had the parts so I'm not concerned that supply will always be this tight.