New Shipping dates

As I started this thread off with a 'I'll believe it when it is in my hands comment' I have now got to say it is in my hands, arriving by second class post on Friday.

Not had much chance to play yet, but pleased it has finally arrived. For information, I'm in the UK, ordered by phone around 12.30 on 29th February.

I know pretty much everyone has said it, but boy it is *small*. I've seen plenty of photos but until it is actually in front of you it is difficult to fully appreciate the size.

I checked today on my March 2nd order, and I'm still trying to pick myself up off the floor.

First date I got was March 5th .. Then the 30th,  next was April 5th, then the 15th.. May 14th ..

WHEE .. I'm next in line !! ..

Boy .. was I mistaken .. when I checked today .. it's now  AUGUST 16th !

It is getting slightly ridiculous now...

There was an official update on 27 April about shipping dates: http://www.element14.com/community/groups/raspberry-pi/blog/2012/04/27/delivery-update--27th-april:

Hi Everyone,

We're excited to report that our next shipment of 4,000 Raspberry Pi's has now left our manufacturers in Asia and will be on their way to customers next week! We have a further 12,000 Raspberry Pi's due to arrive by the third week of May. We will have regular volume shipments thereafter. By early next week, all 110,000 customers who have ordered with element14 - wherever you are in the world - will receive a confirmed delivery date. As previously communicated, this will be no later than the end of June for those who ordered before April 18th.

I didn't get a confirmation e-mail on the week of 30 April, so I sent a polite e-mail to Newark customer service.  Here was their reply:

Hello John,

You should receive this [your RasPi] before the end of June, we still have no exact date.  I do apologize, we do not have a list for the orders.  Any further updates will be posted at the link below. Thank you for your patience.

http://www.element14.com/community/groups/raspberry-pi?view=overview

The August 16th date is bogus.  My order at newark.com says the same thing.  I've read elsewhere that it's just a default placeholder until your board is about to ship.

I also didn't recieved any confirmed delivery date. But I asume it as normal as I don't really now what was happening with orders in my country (all were locked if you didn't pay months in advance). This morning I had my order cancelled definitely because I'm not ok with this kind of bad treatment to customers forcing them to pay for something so much time prior to delivery.

Maybe, if I ever order again with Farnell/element14 in the future, this changes and things follow a "normal" path. But, right now, this is the worse chaos I should have never seen (and I have been years waiting for the openpandora).

There is an update from Jenny Peters that says that in addition to the 12000 units

scheduled to arrive from the factory this week, there are 30000 more units

scheduled to arrive before the end of May, and then 3 more large deliveries in June.

This news hasn't made it into the FAQ here yet, but hopefully soon.

Jenny also claims to know who has the master list of orders!

JennyPeters on May 13, 2012 at 8:50 pm on the RPI.org forum wrote:

"I dont have the full usa list currently so will have to wait for tomorrow but i will do then. I keep saying this and I know its not helpful but Newarks system is wrong and its really not worth checking there right now. I know that’s unimpressive and we’re trying to fix it – its making it hard for our internal and ‘chat’ teams to answer queries too. The newark team understand the frustration its causing and are doing everything they can to fix it. We just want to be honest, however I know who has the master list of orders and she has been helping me update here…..so will check and revert asap. We have our largest shipments yet arriving…..12,000 mid May, over 30000 end may and then 3 more large deliveries in the first few weeks of June so fully believe we will meet the commitment that “all orders placed by April 18th will be delivered by end June”…………so bear with us"

Steve,

Wonderful to hear that people are actually receiving their RPs. I hope they are everything we've expected and have the impact on promoting interest in programming that was intended.

However, unless you ordered yours before end of April, or happen to live in the UK, or are just lucky, all the dates being bandied about for June seem wildly optimistic.

After ordering and paying on March 3rd, I eventually got a fuzzily worded email stating a ship date in June. My experience w/qualified promises being what it is, I emailed the seller to confirm. After multiple emails they finally said "the system" still shows a ship date of mid-August (about 6 months).

Visionary aims, manufacturing and QA problems, "first come, first served", I get all that. And, I gather there is an enormous fan base for this project - I'm in support of it too. I bought this for my kids and when they're done w/it will donate it to their school. I guess an August delivery will still work - don't really have much choice. Summer being what it is they won't have learned programming by the time this latest (and I DO mean LATEST) ship date rolls around. But, really, if they'd had it in hand they could have learned basic programming in 6 months.

Sure hope these things work as promised once they arrive!

I truly do hope the June dates come to pass, but I wouldn't be placing any bets on it at this point.

To be fair and accurate, I gave payment details but my account wasn't charged yet and won't be until the items ship (whenever that is...). And customer service w/element14 tells me that there are 34,000 of the things on (back)order. No way of telling where I am in line (or the queue ), but that's a lot of orders to fill w/the shipments of 12,000 and 13,000 or so that are being discussed. Whew!

Hello Cowboy,

I do live in the UK and I placed my order on the 29th February at around 12.30pm to give some idea of order / delivery times.

I do tend to agree with you, there is no way this is going to make it into schools for this year. Even if they were commonly available now, I suspect school budgets are set at the beginning of the year and this would mean no chance to by them en masse now.

It's a shame, if they had originally appeared in late November last year as originally hoped then I guess this would have been the year of the pi, but I think now 2013 is much more likely.

I did argue in the Pi forum that a cheap second hand machine would deliver a lot of the same benefits as the pi in the short term - I bought a second has base unit for £25 recently, I could have put Ubuntu, Mint etc on that and it would cover about 90% of what the Pi is being s'old' on. I know a full size machine is power hungrym, I know schools couldn't do the same as me and I know only the Pi would fit in my pocket, but I think in some circumstances the Pi could be the wrong choice.

I ordered my Pi March 2 (Order # 2053xx) from Newark in the USA. My expected ship date just changed from 14 August to 03 July.

Yet another data point.