size of first shipment

Interesting point you make coder 27. Is there anyone else around here that can shed any light on this ? I've tried to find more info, but nothnig seems clear about the 8,000 that were floating around somewhere between here and China ?

Or have I missed some news ?

Replying to myself, is that a bad habit ? Anyway, I've posed the question over in the RasPi forums. Any significant information and I will post here too.

That's if I don't get banned for asking a difficult question...

Mushroom management at its very best.  I wonder how long it'll take the blog fanbois to realize that the Foundation is to openness as Facebook is to privacy.

There is not a lot I can add to that

For what it's worth

JennyPeters on April 15, 2012 at 1:55 pm said:     

Next 4000 expected in may – exact date still to be agreed

JennyPeters on April 15, 2012 at 4:23 pm said:     

Many more thousand due in June

above two comments from http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1022#comments

JennyPeters on April 15, 2012 at 11:02 am said:     

The first batch that arrived in the UK with raspberry Pi contained 2000 Raspberry Pi’s. The foundation kept a small number to use in the continued promotion and education of this amazing little  device and shared the rest between ourselves (element14) and RS. We (element14/Premier Farnell) have split that first delivery to ensure the first customers who placed in all countries are able to receive these fairly. Our next delivery of 4000 (ie 50% of the ‘missing’ 8000) is due to arrive in mid-May. After that we expect to start receiving the higher volume production quantities in June and delivery times will then start to improve. We will confirm delivery dates to customers as soon as we have confirmation of the arrival of these quantities and know that the commitment we are giving is accurate. We appreciate everyone’s patience but as manufacturing is now getting underway

above from http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1011#comments

Thanks jbeale, good citation from JennyPeters.

I especially enjoyed hearing "the higher volume production quantities in June and delivery times will then start to improve".

The question I'd really like to ask though is:

• "Roughly, to the nearest quarter, by when do you expect the production and registration/preorder curves to intersect, so that boards are available for delivery ex-stock?".
  

and also:

Stuart Lea on April 14, 2012 at 8:33 am said:     

I spoke with Farnell in the UK yesterday and they said that they had 62,000 RPis on back order – a lot less than I expected considering all of the talk of 1 million +.

above from: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1011#comments

(Note, I haven't been able to find any claims of million+ "orders" for RPi. I do recall a reference to vast numbers of "page accesses" eg. hits, during the initial rush, but  hits != orders.)

I'd love to know that too, although from what I've gathered, neither production rate nor demand rate have been "well behaved functions" so far, so I can see why they are reluctant to extrapolate to find the intersection of the two. :-)

claim of over 2 million here http://elinux.org/RPi_Buying_Guide#Q:_Couldn.27t_this_have_been_handled_better.2C_I_couldn.27t_get_on_the_site_to_order_and_they_sold_too_quickly.3F

Every techie in the inner solar system wants one, except for those of us who want a whole pile of them.

And for every techie who wants to play with the hardware, there are N times as many people who saw the TV, newspaper or website news on launch day and now want a $35 media player, for large N.

But Joe Bloggs doesn't shop at Farnell nor RS, he shops at Amazon, so I very much doubt that the "registrations of interest" are representative of the real level of demand.  That won't appear until the education market materializes, or until they start selling in bulk to 3rd parties for resale to the masses.

Farnell and RS are set to make an absolute fortune, if they play their cards right and get their costs right down through massive volume manufacture and good PR and promotion.  They have this huge sector entirely to themselves, for now.

I think the claims of millions came about by extrapolating the claims of 700 "orders" per second continuing through the end of the first week: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/05/raspberry-pi-demand

with 86400 seconds in a day, and 2 distributors, it doesn't take very long to get to 2+ million orders.

Stuart Lea's quote of around 62000 is interesting, as one of the sales people told me (when I called up in March) there had 50,000 (approx) back orders, so after the initial rush there haven't been *that* many subsequent orders. I think that as commented elsewhere, that people are waiting until they are freely available before they order ? Also I'm presuming this is Farnell UK's back orders, not including any international distributors.

Looking at the timeframe for this 'missing' batch as quoted by Jenny and touching on the start of this thread....is a month enough to make 8,000 from kit form ? Or am I being overly cynical ? If they were ready made, surely Farnell could get them over here faster than mid May ?

Stuart Lea's quote of around 62000 is interesting, as one of the sales people told me (when I called up in March) there had 50,000 (approx) back orders, so after the initial rush there haven't been *that* many subsequent orders. I think that as commented elsewhere, that people are waiting until they are freely available before they order ? Also I'm presuming this is Farnell UK's back orders, not including any international distributors.

Looking at the timeframe for this 'missing' batch as quoted by Jenny and touching on the start of this thread....is a month enough to make 8,000 from kit form ? Or am I being overly cynical ? If they were ready made, surely Farnell could get them over here faster than mid May ?

manufacturing supposedly takes 2 weeks after parts are sourced.

For example, on Feb 6 we heard that the crystal had finally been sourced,

so production would be complete 14 days later on Feb 20.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/615

Also, on March 30, message 14 in this thread:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/general-discussion/new-e-mail-from-element14

Liz said:

"All the parts are ordered and in place, and positioned at the factory so it should

only take a couple of days to make a board (or tens of thousands of boards –

I don't know what batch sizes RS and Farnell are making, but I do know they want

to get their backlogs dealt with as soon as possible) from scratch."

She may have meant "couple of weeks" instead of "couple of days".

The thing I don't understand is that I would take Liz's quote above as referring to the batches that Farnell are making, not the remaining 8,000 from the mythical first batch of 10K. Even if it was a couple of weeks, surely the 8,000 should have been made by now ! I wonder if I will get a firm answer back in the RasPi forum ?

Is it me, or is there a *lot* of conflicting information ?

It is indeed a mess, but I have an idea on how to clear it up.

Let's ask Element 14 and RS to identify the serial numbers of the boards that they each are selling.  They obviously know this information since it is important when customers return boards to them, otherwise there would be potential for confusion and/or cheating.

The ranges of serial numbers will be useful information for Rpi's wiki and other information pages, even Wikipedia, once the whole story of production unfolds and millions of Rpi enter education.  At the same time, it will tell us how many units are being manufactured by each party, and later, by each factory.

It's important to realize that although serial numbers are company information, they cannot be hidden from us since everyone who receives a board could post their serial number and hence it will become public knowledge anyway.  Element 14 and RS might realize this, and save us the effort by volunteering the data.

Morgaine.