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Comment by tudorw | Hacker News Reader

Update: E-Bay UK has them in buckets... about £140 for the leading item right now...

Great news that the Pi is shipping, there must be a lot of eager people out there, cannot wait to see the first wave of responses, genuinely exciting times ahead :) Oh, and don't forget to add one of these to the order for open audiophile audio out :) http://nwavguy.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/odac-released.html

"We now have in excess of 100,000 confirmed orders for the Raspberry Pi globally and can confirm that everyone who ordered before 18th April (i.e. today!) will definitely receive their Raspberry Pi before the end of June 2012, whatever your existing order confirmation says! "

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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 retail price is pathetic!

If they didn't want them in the first place they shouldn't buy them!

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.

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 :)

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.

They say they'll ship 100,000 units in the next 10 or so weeks.

How are they refusing to meet demand?

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.

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.

140 quid is an insane amount of money to pay, when at that price there are plenty of stronger boards available, just take the BeagleBoard-Xm which has a much stronger chipset, or even stand alone Ainol A10 boxes for around $100. The nonhackers could grab a A10 based tablet, for $120 or so.

About the only thing RPi has going for it is the slightly smaller size factor (at >$100 prices).

In theory, the first Raspberries should have been sold for $70-$100 by the foundation and only when mass production was assured, then the price should have been dropped to the target $35 for B.

The only catch in this dream scenario is: how do you convince the early adopters to pay higher prices, if you are committed to lower prices later on. You do not want to lie to your customers. Maybe some sort numbered certificate system should have been made something like OLPC program, buy one Raspberry for $70 and school or your choice gets one for free when mass production is ready.

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