when is next batch due?

I have to agree that we the customers need some of these details.  It's almost 7 weeks since launch and I'm sure that RS and Farnell/Newark has discussion before the launch, but there should have been some advances by the two vendors in production of more RPi units.  You would think that by now both vendors should be able to tell us how many "orders" they actually have and where customers sit on the list.  Similarly, they should be able to tell us how many they have ordered and how long before they are expected to arrive.  From there we can match the two pieces of info to know when we can expect our orders.  The information we see listed in the OP gives us no clear understanding where we stand.

There is a local TV news report here: http://t.co/2ZfsFX95 RS state they have 250000 customers on a waiting list.

An amazing level of interest that no one could have predicted. This also bodes well for ongoing support and availability of software and add ons.

As I ordered on the 29th of March February, I am hoping for one during May.

Roger,

   I would have to say good luck. If you ordered on 29 March, you are likely behind a few thousand customers that ordered on 29 February. I ordered a few hours after launch and I still don't have a scheduled ship date.

I ordered immediately over the phone, the website went down seconds after launch so I jumped right on the phone and made my order.

To this date, I still don't know when my Raspberry Pi will come, even though I was one of the first..

Roger,

  I'm a little dubious about press reports of huge waiting lists,

without much to corroborate them.  This forum has about 5K members,

which is about 2% of the 250,000 claimed RS waiting list.   The RPi forum

has only about 3 times as many members.   I would expect that a much

larger percentage of people on the waiting list would subscribe to one or

both of the the forums, because otherwise it is very difficult to understand

exactly what the device can do, or when it might be delivered.

Early press reports were of 700 orders per second.  With only

700 allocated per distributor, that would last about 1 second.

But we have seen reports that people who ordered after two

hours were in the first batch.  So it looks more like one order

every 5 seconds for the first 2 hours (probably largely phone

orders due to the crashed websites).

That isn't to say that there won't be huge orders in the future,

particularly when the backlog is eliminated and the

one-per-customer limit is removed, and a case is available, etc.

I'm interested in what kind of date range I could expect a RPi in, having ordered one yesterday in repsonse to a Farnell email that stated 'You can now Pre-Order your Raspberry Pi' to which I did. If I am in a queue of tens or hundreds of thousands that are already in a queue, are the distros just keen to keep their queues high to help RPi with expectations of volumes, or are they trying to get people to at least place an order and give up their credit card numbers now before publicity dies down and people would then not bother or even forget about the RPi?

What I'm wondering now is if my order is so far down the list, will it come with a case... and will there be any 'free' tshirts left that I was also made aware of on the order page?!

Hello Roger,

I also think those estimates of 250,000 are a little overboard. Either someone here or on the RasPi forums had contacted Farnell about ordering and if memory serves me correctly they said they had about 62,000 back orders. This may only include UK orders and perhaps the 250,000 could include all international orders, but much like coder27, I think these figures may have been extrapolated from flimsy original data.

A typo - I ordered 29th February not March, early afternoon.

Latest advice I had from Farnell was to refer to the last date they had notified to me. 

I sure hope the next shipment doesn't take that long to get in.  I really want one now.  It good to see that it's doing really well.  I will have to be on top of things next time something comes out I really want.

I'm not so sure that 250,000 really is overboard for RS, since the Element 14 representative wrote this on the Rpi blog today:

  > JennyPeters on April 18, 2012 at 8:42 pm said:

  >

  > We have over 100,000 confirmed orders globally.

  > These are orders and not expressions of interest or pre-registrations.

Although Jenny doesn't say how many expressions of interest they received, it would certainly be more than the 100,000 confirmed orders, and hence it's possible that their total number is right alongside RS's figure.  The ballpark seems to be the right one, not overboard.

And of course since a lot of techies like myself want many boards but cannot express that requirement while the 1-per-person restriction is in place, the real level of demand is certain to be much higher still.

Morgaine.