They are absolutely doing it intentionally. Industry gets first crack, then some educators so they can get some good press, then the rest of us get scraps.
Comment on Raspberry Pi 5: available now!
DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Already sold out? Have they learned nothing? At this point they have to be doing it intentionally.
hiddengoat@kbin.social 11 months ago
TrejoPhD@lemmy.world 11 months ago
As an educator, still pretty hard for us to get them, too.
But it’s not them, it’s silicon in general. It’s why car prices have gone up, too.
frezik@midwest.social 11 months ago
What do you think they should do? Manufacturing more won’t help; bots will buy all available initial stock regardless. You can try using exclusive channels, but then you exclude a whole lot of people who will naturally get upset. Increasing the initial price will piss people off, too.
CmdrShepard@lemmy.one 11 months ago
They’re only valuable for scalpers because they’re so hard to get. If they wouldn’t constantly put business orders above consumer orders, the demand for scalping would evaporate just like it has for every other consumer electronic device. People aren’t selling PS5s for $1000 anymore because you can just go buy one from the store.
frezik@midwest.social 11 months ago
How these bot networks work is they setup scripts to grab every available product they can. They don’t care what it is; could be shoes, designer bag, GPU, whatever. They just pick something that has worked in the past.
RPis have worked in the past. Now, what they might see is that the new version doesn’t move on eBay like the old ones did. The $500 RPi5 will sit untouched. If so, then the RPi5 will likely be the last time we see this kind of release behavior. But it won’t happen this time, and there’s little the RPi Foundation can do about it.
This is basically what happened in the GPU market this past generation. Scalpers bought up the first few weeks of stock for big flagship releases, but they sat there. Then they moved on, and the launch day availability was much better.
GreenMario@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Scalp their own product and sell it for a markup just like how Nintendo does it with amibos and mini consoles.
stewsters@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If it’s going to get scalped anyways, I would prefer we did it in the open auction style the first half year, with the RPI foundation getting the proceeds.