Raspberry Pi Stock

Neither RS or Farnell have stock. I thought that was clear from all the press releases over the last couple of days. The Pis are still on their way from China. The only difference is that Farnell is taking concrete orders while RS are asking people for their details and will contact them shortly. A bit frustrating all round but there is no reason to suppose that either company will get a Pi to you any sooner. I registered with RS soon after 6:00am on 29th and got a generic confirmation from them yesterday.

Well you are doing better than me then.

I registered months ago with PI and got no email.  Prior to Wednesday 6am was the story that it was only pre ordering?  Not clear at all, just teasing posts on a website.

I have registered via RS and got nothing other than acnowledgement I had registered.

My son's DT project, designed around the Pi, which at the time of design was expected end 2011, will be submitted with a Intel inside sticker in the next few days.

Designing a project around a new platform that has yet to ship will be a hard lesson in the realities of life. You roll the dice and some times you lose.

I think it is fair to say that many of the people who registered on the Raspberry Pi site did not get an email, myself included. It would have thought it was clear that they just got swamped in the end. They are a charity and have no staff as they all have full-time jobs, except Liz, who is an unpaid volunteer. In the end the infrastructure could not cope under the strain and they have been frantically been trying to keep their heads above water for a few weeks now. The server certainly could not cope with the demands and constant timeouts have been a feature. What started as a small charitable project has turned into a monster. RaspBerry Pi has been trending on Twitter, it is on the radio, TV, newspapers, etc and I gather perhaps over a million people have now expressed an interest globally. I would imagine that the team are shellshocked and is currently planning how to upsize the organisation to cope with the demand.

Why companies go for pre-ordering, when the reality is that they've not got anything to sell while the product is in a container somewhere between here and China, I'll never understand. It's bound to lead to frustration and, nowdays, endless emails from fed up customers. it reminds me of the halcyon days of Sinclair. I waited 6 months for my QL and when it did arrive half the gummins were hanging out the back... Those were the days (wistful sigh)...

I'd love a Raspberry Pi, but I'll buy one when someone actually has one to sell me.

I registered an interest on the raspberry pi website. As there was no check boxes saying they could share this information with other companies, I am glad they did not give this list to farnell or RS. If they did they may well have been in breach of data protection legislation.

The factory in China let them down. I think in the end there was so much in progress that they could not move the launch date.

It's reminding me of ordering my Acorn Atom as well.

I wonder what Acorn or Sinclair would have done if they had orders for a million units within two days of the launch.

Richard,

     I don't believe that the factory in China let them down.  The foundation stated long in advance that the first order would be for only 10,000 units and that these first units would be somehwat of a first-come, first-served sales.  The foundation also said that the would already be getting the next orders built while the first were being delivered.

     I guess the only mistakes that were made were related to not doing any contingency planning.  Firstly, the foundation said that they wouldn't take any money without actually having stock in their hands.  However on launch day it seems that the original 10,000 were still somewhere between China and the UK.  I don't think that the launch should have occurred until Farnell and RS actually had their share (what it was, like 5,000 each) sitting on their warehouse shelves with staff and infrastructure in place to take orders.  Secondly, did the teams at RS and Farnell really look to see if their current network was ready to handle an international onslaught?  I think not.  RS doesn't really have a direct to consumer setup and their international partner/resellers (at least in Canada) don't have any clue about the R-Pi.  Farnell's website doesn't even have clear links for their resellers in North America.  You have to had known that Newark is their team on the other side of the pond.  Thirdly, the teams at RS/Farnell and the foundation are all smart people.  They are high-tech gurus with years of technical, marketing and financial experience.  Being told that they couldn't have foreseen the demand or couldn't have the servers in place to deal with the traffic is really not acceptable.  The fact the "raspberrypi.org" moved to a static site proved that at least some thought was given to traffic issues.

    In the end I hope at least that from a manufacturing point of view that there were contigency discussions as to what the capacity of the manufacturer is.  I personally want to order more R-Pi's in the future and really don't want to wait months to get them.

I'm another one that was registered on the Raspberry Pi site and didn't get the expected email from them. The first I knew about anything happening was when I saw the news on Yahoo that the website had gone down. By that time it was probably turning in to a feeding frenzy for all the news media. It makes me wonder how many of the people that have expressed an interest in RPi, since then, will actually buy one in the end. In the meantime the people who were genuinely interested - before it became a worldwide news headline - have effectively been pushed to the back of the queue. I would certainly be willing to pay for one in advance, to ensure that I got one as soon as possible, and not be slowed down by all the people that have jumped on this latest bandwagon.

I think you are being too harsh on them. Raspberry in the last weeks got a huge attention from the media, maybe this scrambled(big time) it's production numbers?