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Hardware

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton Discusses Stock Updates, Industry Prioritization (tomshardware.com) 59

Posted by BeauHD from the lots-to-unpack-here dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: YouTuber Jeff Geerling recently flew over to the UK to sit down with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton for a chat about shortages, predictions, the Raspberry Pi Pico and other hot topics. The short of it is that stock levels are improving, close to Upton's 2022 prediction and that we are now seeing better stock levels than 2022 as Raspberry Pi slowly catches up with the backlog. Upton explained the reasoning behind prioritizing OEM customers over consumers, and addresses some of the negativity that was levied on Raspberry Pi by a minority of the passionate and vocal community.

The video starts with Geerling candidly explaining that his trip to the UK was not funded by Raspberry Pi, rather it was funded via sponsorship and Patreon supporters. With that out of the way Geerling covers a series of topics with Upton, and we've been through the video and pulled out the key points, with timestamps for you to listen to. In regard to the company's product and shipment progress, Upton said: "So quarter one this year was our worst quarter in terms of production and shipment. [...] We did about 750 to 800,000 units in Q1 this year [due to shifting production during the Christmas period]."

With progress being made on filling backlog and availability, Upton said the company expects to move two million units in the second quarter, with the third and fourth quarters of 2023 being "unconstrained."
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Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton Discusses Stock Updates, Industry Prioritization More

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton Discusses Stock Updates, Industry Prioritization

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  • Far far too late (Score:3)

    by Stickboy75 ( 1868986 ) on Friday May 19, 2023 @07:07PM (#63536097)
    I doubt I will ever buy a Pi again. It's clear their reasoning was always that OEM customers need a reliable supply..... well, so do they hobbyists. And frankly they built you. You simply chose wrong.

    • Re:Far far too late (Score:4)

      by myowntrueself ( 607117 ) on Friday May 19, 2023 @07:26PM (#63536127)

      I doubt I will ever buy a Pi again. It's clear their reasoning was always that OEM customers need a reliable supply..... well, so do they hobbyists. And frankly they built you. You simply chose wrong.

      Absolutely, they are ridiculously over priced.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Absolutely, they are ridiculously over priced.

        Yes, they were a little pricey even when you could just buy the mainboards. They're over-the-top ridiculous when you can only buy them in "kits" with a power supply, case, USB and HDMI dongles, keyboard and mouse... all the things you don't need when you're trying to build the mainboard into a product. That's the reason we've switched to alternatives like OrangePi and MangoPi and we won't be going back even if RPi gets their shit together to sort out their supply problems.

        • Yeah, not sure who the market for the kits are in general - there's a 3rd party market for cases while most of us can trivially source a keyboard, mouse, display and network cables from our existing stash or local electronics retailers.

          I'd probably get the power supply given concerns over dodgy chargers and voltage over USB-C. But even that could be sourced independently from a known list of 'good' equipment.

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            Yeah, not sure who the market for the kits are in general - there's a 3rd party market for cases while most of us can trivially source a keyboard, mouse, display and network cables from our existing stash or local electronics retailers.

            I haven't had a keyboard or mouse connected to one in years, nor used any display that was more than a small touchscreen. Cases are usually useless, because anything I'm building is going to need a custom case anyway to accommodate hats and random circuitry. So the market is likely mostly limited to first-time users.

            I'd probably get the power supply given concerns over dodgy chargers and voltage over USB-C. But even that could be sourced independently from a known list of 'good' equipment.

            Or power the Pi from a PoE hat or a dual-motor hat or any number of other hats that provide power. A lot of projects don't end up using a USB-C power supply at all after the initial board con

        • It doesnt help that they became crazy popular among HAM operators.

      • Absolutely, they are ridiculously over priced.

        You're an idiot. Who's offering comparable product for significantly lower prices?

        • Absolutely, they are ridiculously over priced.

          You're an idiot. Who's offering comparable product for significantly lower prices?

          Do I look like Google? Does anything in my name or sig suggest that I work for Google or do Google searches for people on demand?

    • I hope Pi availability comes soon. Raspberry Pis are not just scarce, they are getting behind the Chinese makes which are cranking boards out, not with price and availability, but leapfrogging in the features department. Then, there are the Intel based SBCs like the Latte Panda. Intel based stuff may not have the cool factor that ARM does, but it gets the job done, and you know that you will have a somewhat consistent UEFI bootloader.

      • Re:Far far too late (Score:4, Informative)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Saturday May 20, 2023 @12:20PM (#63537421) Homepage Journal

        I hope Pi availability comes soon. Raspberry Pis are not just scarce, they are getting behind the Chinese makes which are cranking boards out, not with price and availability, but leapfrogging in the features department.

        Now if only they were well supported in a mainstream distro, rather than being in a constant state of brokenness.

        Then, there are the Intel based SBCs like the Latte Panda. Intel based stuff may not have the cool factor that ARM does, but it gets the job done, and you know that you will have a somewhat consistent UEFI bootloader.

        Their oldest board is over a hundred dollars and has vastly worse connectivity than the Raspberry Pi 4 (10/100 Ethernet, fewer GPIO pins, only one USB 3 port, no PoE support). Their latest model, while way faster and more capable than the Raspberry Pi 4, also costs almost six hundred dollars and is much larger. These things are not remotely in the same price class as Raspberry Pi.

      • Raspberry Pis are not just scarce, they are getting behind the Chinese makes which are cranking boards out, not with price and availability, but leapfrogging in the features department.

        They're not getting behind the Chinese; they were dependent on the Chinese to manufacture their cheap products, even after the Chinese stole their intellectual property via the ARM China fiasco. Now there's a question whether the Chinese can even manufacture sufficient numbers of integrated components to put together the Raspberry Pi designs. And if the Chinese can't manufacture millions of high end SoCs at will, it will also mean that those SoCs will be more expensive.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      I doubt I will ever buy a Pi again.

      I said that as well, then I looked at the cost of alternatives as well as the general support they are given by the hobby community and can't wait to get back to buying Pis again.

      Unless you can find me another $45 SBC with the capabilities and software (as well as project compatibility and range of pi hats available)? If so I'm all for jumping ship.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      I moved on to the Orange Pi line of SBCs. Superior design, performance, and price.

      Plus, they're always in stock.

      Raspberry Pi's ship has sailed.

  • It's cheaper to just hunt down a second hand laptop on craigslist or the local pawn shops, just check Amazon for a raspad and pi_4 they are sold separately

    • Re:The pi has gotten too expensive (Score:4, Informative)

      by BeaverCleaver ( 673164 ) on Friday May 19, 2023 @07:39PM (#63536143)

      It's cheaper to just hunt down a second hand laptop on craigslist or the local pawn shops, just check Amazon for a raspad and pi_4 they are sold separately

      And that's why they are prioritising OEMs. We hobbyists can easily use something else to run our home automation, media box or weather station. Often, using a Pi was overkill anyway, but before the shortage we didn't care because the Pi could always be repurposed later. Now that there is a shortage, we have moved on to other single board computers, the ESP32 series, or even the Pi 2040 microcontroller.

      If you make a commercial product based on a Pi, you don''t have that choice. You can't just tell your customers "go buy a cheap laptop on the internet."

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        And that's why they are prioritising OEMs. We hobbyists can easily use something else to run our home automation, media box or weather station.

        Only if your requirements are very limited. Most of the stuff I've done with the Pi has a Raspberry Pi 4 as the minimum hardware, and even that really isn't always fast enough. It also has a hard requirement of being either ARM or x86 (precompiled binary dependencies), has form factor constraints, and requires Ethernet, DSI, I2C, and PoE.

        I barely managed to find almost all the Raspberry Pi boards I needed during the pandemic, but when I needed one more, I ended up rewriting large amounts of code to suppor

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kriston ( 7886 )

          Have you considered the Orange Pi line of SBCs? I find them so much better than Raspberry Pi and cheaper than Banana Pi.

          • How mainlined is the RK3399 in the Orange Pi LTS 4? Which seems to be $90+, it's not exactly cheap, if you could get a raspi 4 8GB it would be that price.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            The lack of center-tapped Ethernet transformers with exposed PoE pins was the deciding factor there. (I didn't learn about Rock Pi putting the PoE pins in a nonstandard location by about a millimeter until after I got the board, at which point swearing was involved when I discovered that the properly compatible long-header Rock Pi PoE board was unavailable.)

            Also, I'm using a lot of GPIO pins. I might have been able to do it with the Orange Pi's limited GPIO connector, but that's cutting it close.

      • If you make a commercial product based on a Pi, you don''t have that choice.

        No manufacturer beyond startup stage is depending on RPi for their mass produced products. RPi has been mostly hapless throughout its product history. They started out primarily a company that put together obsolete chips for educational purposes.

    • A laptop is bigger than a pi. It's not silent. It consumes more power also. There is a place for both. But I agree with you the Pis have gotten too expensive. You can buy other SBCs for much less. The problem is the OS support.

  • The damage is done (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Friday May 19, 2023 @07:32PM (#63536135)
    Everyone who needed some small cheap computer during the last years has had plenty of time by now to evaluate the multitude of Raspberry Pi alternatives that were actually delivered. Raspberry's past advantage of "being that one company whose product is known to all the makers out there" is gone, now people know the alternatives, and they are not worse. For a long time, Raspberry was neither the cheapest nor the best performing option, but still sold well because people wanted to use what they already knew. Not anymore.

    • Re:The damage is done (Score:4, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday May 20, 2023 @10:55AM (#63537261)

      Everyone who needed some small cheap computer during the last years has had plenty of time by now to evaluate the multitude of Raspberry Pi alternatives that were actually delivered.

      I evaluated them. They were either 4x the RRP, or didn't have compatibility with the countless projects and HATs out there, or both. No damage is really done. People won't buy Pis while they are being hawked at ludicrous costs, but the hobby community is largely price sensitive and if Pis come available at RRP again they'll instantly jump back.

      • Re:The damage is done (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Saturday May 20, 2023 @12:29PM (#63537437) Homepage Journal

        Everyone who needed some small cheap computer during the last years has had plenty of time by now to evaluate the multitude of Raspberry Pi alternatives that were actually delivered.

        I evaluated them. They were either 4x the RRP, or didn't have compatibility with the countless projects and HATs out there, or both. No damage is really done. People won't buy Pis while they are being hawked at ludicrous costs, but the hobby community is largely price sensitive and if Pis come available at RRP again they'll instantly jump back.

        If Banana Pi would actually ship the M6, it might be what you're looking for. It is supposed to be pretty pin-compatible with the Pi 4, but faster and with an M.2 slot for NVME and four USB 3 ports instead of a mix of USB 2. The price isn't known yet, though.

        • The price isn't known yet, though.

          The spec list along puts it out of the Pi's price range. The thing is the whole reason the Pi had success was the price, the whole reason for the price was special deals with vendors and fabs that are incompatible with traditional manufacturing, and also as a result incompatible with a stable supply of parts. Everyone here complaining about the price and the supply issues fails to see that they can pick one or the other, and the only way Pis will be generally available is if there is absolutely no logistics

  • Scrooged (Score:5, Funny)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Friday May 19, 2023 @07:44PM (#63536147)

    Is Eben short for Ebeneezer?

    If so, well, 'nuff said.

  • RISC-V (Score:4, Informative)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Friday May 19, 2023 @07:58PM (#63536165) Homepage Journal

    RISC-V is the Captain now.

  • Proprietary RISC V cores (Score:4, Insightful)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Friday May 19, 2023 @08:38PM (#63536187)

    Speaking in regards to RISC V:

    I tend to get flamed a little bit for saying this, but people will say, "Ah, but on GitHub, you can find this excellent core that is much more performant than anything I make."

    But there really is a shortage of good, licensable high-performance [RISC-V] cores.

    This is truly sad, but not unexpected. Despite all the hype, RISC V implementations are just as proprietary as ARM. And running Linux on ARM is truly discouraging, honestly. Unmaintained kernel forks, binary blobs, esoteric boot loaders (even locked boot loaders). RISC V will be no different.

    The only advantage to Pi over all other boards is broad community support (despite Broadcom's proprietary bits), and no need for custom forks of distros. If they use RISC V hopefully we'll see the same level of wide-spread support.

    • The Risc-V boot process seems a lot more standardized than ARM with OpenSBI making it easier to port EDK2 UEFI to the VisionFive 2 only months after launch.

      No argument from me on the ARM kernel forks but that's a malaise of leftovers from the $25 streaming box market. No software support from the OEM at all except to nominally pass various Android test suites based on reference designs from companies such as Rockchip and Allwinner.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      This is truly sad, but not unexpected. Despite all the hype, RISC V implementations are just as proprietary as ARM. And running Linux on ARM is truly discouraging, honestly. Unmaintained kernel forks, binary blobs, esoteric boot loaders (even locked boot loaders). RISC V will be no different.

      RISC-V is only open-source architecture. The architecture itself is free to use. The implementation is completely up to you - you don't pay a dime to RISC-V for your implementation. So whether you use TTL ICs, FPGAs, or

    • RISC V is bullshit. Its an ancient design from 20 years ago. It got adopted by the Chinese because they want their computing hardware to be independent of WIntel and the US.

      Now they want people outside China to make it into a competitive CPU processor because nationally they're too untalented, and now they want to sucker FOSS zealots into doing software development and linux compatibility for their linux OS platform. I have better things to do with my free time.

      Most important, they made this strategic de

  • The $5 board for $25 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Friday May 19, 2023 @08:58PM (#63536209)

    I couldn't find a single vendor selling the boards at the advertised price.
    Either they were out of stock or twice as expensive or you had to buy the overpriced 'deluxe' bundle.

  • 700k units in the first quarter and none for sale on the retail market? Hard to understand, but I guess the demand is huge. I was hoping to get a Pi 4B for a project but they seem to be particularly rare. And expensive even when available, probably $80 for the 4 gig devices with shipping. Looks like 3rd quarter at best.

  • Eben eben, you promise the world (Score:3)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Saturday May 20, 2023 @12:43AM (#63536509)
    And still almost no inventory available on rpilocator for the last year and a half, most days I've checked there's only been either a handful or up to 10 distributors that actually have stock. As of today there is only a few three pluses and zero W's. Still no end in sight.

  • There *are* alternatives, but with caveats (Score:3, Informative)

    by GeorgeY ( 9486967 ) on Saturday May 20, 2023 @01:31AM (#63536581)
    I have both RPi 4 and Orange Pi 5, though the second one is more expensive, hardware is much faster (especially graphics). The problem is that software is ancient - OPi5 has kernel 5.10 and hacked Mali driver. Can be used as a toy or controller for RPi-like project but not for much else until they get their act together.
    On the other hand RPi 4 is currently on Kernel 6.2 and being updated constantly.

  • Maybe a PI 5? (Score:3)

    by freedom_surfer ( 203272 ) on Saturday May 20, 2023 @01:18PM (#63537511) Homepage

    The last few years have last a bad taste in my mouth. I figure they have one chance at redemption when the PI 5 comes out by making it cheap and plentiful. If neither is true, it will be a dead platform as far as my house is concerned.

    • People don't get what's going on with the company RaspberryPi Ltd., or what the Chinese did to them. The highest selling point of the company's intellectual property was its licenseable proprietary SoC design, and that was indirectly stolen by ARM China. Even worse, they still have to depend on China to manufacture its units, and between covid, the semiconductor tech lockdown from the US & "friends", and RPi's extremely low priority as manufacturing customer, they cannot get any of their RPi products

    • If neither is true, it will be a dead platform as far as my house is concerned.

      Are you looking for a platform or a cheap SBC? If it's in your house it sounds like you would be happy with anything and easily able to jump at alternatives, and if that's the case I'll bet you a Marsbar that you'll go right back to "dead" Raspberry Pis if they do become available at a convincing price point.

      You're not building a business around a platform as a hobbyist. If you're price conscious the Pi won't be dead to you despite your strong claims.

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