Lost my place in line due to Elements incompetence

Your story raises a related issue.

Credit cards are issued with expiry dates no more than 3-4 years in the future --- let's call it 5 years to be generous, which makes the average remaining life of a given credit card 2.5 years.  The bulk of initial Pi orders will be filled by the end of June we have been informed, which is 4 months from the launch date on 29th February.

4 months is 13.333...% of 2.5 years, which means that up to 13% of all credit cards used for preordering Pi will have expired during the wait for preorders.

If Element 14 has no way to change your credit card number without you losing your place in the queue, then this will also apply to up to 13% of credit card orders owing to card expiry during the interval.

If this is true, there are going to be a lot of unhappy customers.

Morgaine.

Your story raises a related issue.

Credit cards are issued with expiry dates no more than 3-4 years in the future --- let's call it 5 years to be generous, which makes the average remaining life of a given credit card 2.5 years.  The bulk of initial Pi orders will be filled by the end of June we have been informed, which is 4 months from the launch date on 29th February.

4 months is 13.333...% of 2.5 years, which means that up to 13% of all credit cards used for preordering Pi will have expired during the wait for preorders.

If Element 14 has no way to change your credit card number without you losing your place in the queue, then this will also apply to up to 13% of credit card orders owing to card expiry during the interval.

If this is true, there are going to be a lot of unhappy customers.

Morgaine.

According to this Element 14 discussion, if your credit card expires Newark will contact you and give you a chance to update your information.  I hope this works, as I am in this situation.  Given that I never got the e-mail to tell me about updated ship dates, I'm a tad dubious that I'll get the credit card e-mail.  It's really silly that you can't update credit card information at newark.com.

Maybe if Element14 realized this could mean a loss of 13% of sales due to pissed off customers they'd finally understand that their customer 'disservice' is going to hurt their bottom line.

@John: That "change card number when our attempt to charge fails" approach ought to cover m m's problem too then.

This brings to mind what I wrote recently about my career experience with dev teams in industry ... let's just say, the situation is somewhat less than perfect.

I should temper that though with my equally common observation that very clever and insightful tech teams often cannot implement sensible and (to them) obvious designs because the requirements imposed by management lie somewhere in the range between not sensible to downright surreal.  Dilbert's PHB is alive and well in industry.

I guess we'll never know whether it's a failure of developers or of management.  Ultimately though, it doesn't matter.  It's a company as a whole that suffers when things go wrong, so everyone is to blame.

Morgaine.

My only question is why they the distribution is so slow, i mean a lot of poeples want a pi but cannot buy one, they can make millions of tablets in month, but pi barelly 10k... i mean everyone want one, make production go faster and sell more, i ordered mine  monday, i hhope to not wait 5-6 months its ridiculous, i will receive mine when a new PI will be available?

@Sylvain:  Yes, that is odd, isn't it.

It's not like any of the components is rare or anything (with the possible exception of the Broadcom SoC), so why not ramp up production by a lot more?  After all, demand is utterly guaranteed so there is zero risk associated with the manufacturing investment, particularly given the educational goals of the Foundation which take the numbers into astronomical territory.

And to make matters even more ridiculous, if they manufactured in greater quantities then their BOM costs would drop still further and so they would make even more profit!  What is there not to like?

It's very curious.

I see only two possibilities that have any chance of explaining it:

1. RS+Farnell are frightened or cautious of high volume manufacturing, because traditionally they have been only distributors, and although they do engage in bespoke manufacturing, it has always been on relatively small scales to satisfy the low volume demand from engineers.
2. Broadcom does not have sufficient manufacturing capacity for the SoC to allow high volume production.

Any other possible reasons?

Morgaine.

I think they need to balance demand and inventory. They want to get them in peoples hands quickly, but if they ramp up production too much, they may find themselves stuck with tons of units they can't sell. If the RPi turns out to be a dud or a newer model comes out, look for people to quickly abandon the current model. I'm sure people would continue to buy the old model, but they'd have to be sold at a loss just to clear inventory. These aren't exactly iPhones.

Steve Jacobs wrote:

 

if they ramp up production too much, they may find themselves stuck with tons of units they can't sell. If the RPi turns out to be a dud or a newer model comes out, look for people to quickly abandon the current model.

Hahaha, good joke.

Also, you're forgetting that they have a monopoly.  Nobody can come out with a newer model to make their old one obsolete, other than they themselves.  Therefore they would not do so until current stocks are dwindling.

I've always wondered the same thing.  How can other companies produce 100,000s and the pi barely 10,000.  just doesnt make any sense.  Like Morgaine was saying larger manufacturing volume means lower BOM.

@Morgaine

Or something like this could come out: http://www.reghardware.com/2012/05/22/chip_maker_via_outs_49_dollar_raspberry_pi_alike/ and people would lose interest in the RPi. I just think they don't want to open the flood gates if they'd get stuck with a bunch of product they can't sell.

Nate Chapman wrote:

 

I've always wondered the same thing.  How can other companies produce 100,000s and the pi barely 10,000. 

You're forgetting that you can't just walk into the facory where Apple makes their stuff and say: "Hey can you drop those tablets you're making, and make some raspberry pi's for us?"

The bigger the factory, the slower they move.

Also, production has been ramped up. The batch of 10k that started in january was delivered in april. By the end of june there will be over 10k per week getting delivered.

Apple has enough money to tell a factory: "We've got the iphone 5 comining DDDDDD. We need XXXX devices on launch day, we'll finalize the design no later than YYYY, can you make them?"

The factory will quote a price, and Apple will have to pay that, even if they don't end up having the design ready in time. Or when they don't sell, apple will have a lot of expensive PBCs lying around.

Those things were simply not within reach of the RPI foundation. They could finance and take the risks on 10k units.

Now Farnell and RS are ramping up production and so far they are not having to take the risk of not selling them. (except for the first 10k batch).

But they have to be careful too. Suppose there are exactly 230000 people in the world who want one. Suppose they ordered 10k then 30k, then 100k and then 300k. Until they put in that order for the bigger batch of 300k units they would still see "huge demand" which exceeds supply. And if they manage to make $3.5 (10%) on each raspberry pi, the whole profit would be drained into "lots of unsold 'pies" after they get their 300k shipment.

So business wise they have to be careful not to get ahead of themselves.

And what if say "samsung" puts out a SOC that has the same features as BCM2835 but doesn't require THREE external regulators, has ethernet, analog audio and VGA onchip so a breakout board for that chip only costs about $15? How much interest would remain for the 'pi after that comes out? All "registered interest" will not turn into orders when that starts shipping!

In short: They ARE ramping up production. They cannot blindly order half a million units and hope they will all sell due to business reasons and production capacity reasons.