Daily Archives: 2022-10-03

Article note: It really is funny how "A well-documented known good system with well-established software stack" (even an aging, somewhat feeble one with the history of "shifty power circuit" "shifty serial implementation" etc.) is so desirable that decent sized niches of the industry started depending on them instead of rolling their own... so thoroughly that you can't actually get them for their original intended education/experimentation purpose right now. I wish one of the other SOC vendors offering a reasonable part with a couple Cortex-A7x cores would get their shit together with a reference board and the software and documentation front, it's absurd that Broadcom - who are traditionally assholes about docs and code - have entrenched simply by only being _moderately_ obstructive to their user base. Rockchip keeps getting close but their software stack is a little too garbage.

Enlarge (credit: Raspberry Pi Foundation)

Shortages for lots of tech components, including things like DDR5 and GPUs, have eased quite a bit since the beginning of 2022, and prices have managed to go down as availability improves. But that reprieve hasn't come for hobbyists hoping to get a Raspberry Pi, which remains as hard to buy today as it was a year ago.

The most recent update on the situation comes from Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton via YouTuber Jeff Geerling—Upton told Geerling that Pi boards are subject to the same supply constraints since the last time he wrote a post about the situation in April. Around 400,000 Pi boards are still produced per month, and some of these are being earmarked to be sent out to consumer retail sites. But Upton says that most of these are still being reserved for and sold to commercial customers who rely on Pi boards to run their businesses.

In short, the update is that there is no update. Upton said in April (and nearly a year ago, when the company raised the price for a Pi board for the first time) that the Broadcom processors at the heart of older Pi boards have been particularly difficult to source, but that high demand had been just as big an issue. Demand for Pi boards increased during the pandemic, and there was no more manufacturing capacity available to meet this demand. Upton said a year ago that there were "early signs that the supply chain situation is starting to ease," but backed-up demand could still explain the short supply even if the Pi's components have gotten easier to buy.

Article note: Ah, new-internet entities trying to make money off of old-internet content. Maybe they'll ad-infest it so badly that everyone will remember hosting static content is super cheap and re-decentralize.