Shipping lead times

One thing that saddens me about this whole preordering business and RPF's believed equal allocation policy is that it's potentially very unfair to one of the two manufacturing partners.  Whichever partner had the most resilient website on the 29th February and during the subsequent week will have received the most expressions of interest and so now has the longest delivery times and so is getting the worst press, equal allocation assumed.  That doesn't seem fair, if the assumption is correct.  (It may not be correct.)

I hope that's not what happened, but if it is then someone needs to be hammering on RPF and Broadcom's door to scale up manufacturing hugely to vanquish all the preorders rapidly and bring delivery times back to parity.

(It's possible that that's not what happened at all of course, and that longer delivery times represent a partner's deliberate choice to manufacture fewer units per month.  As nobody seems to be quoting hard figures, we may not be able to distinguish between the various possibilities.)

I am in Germany and ordered on 2012-06-22 via the consumer route (OPRxxx number). No news yet.

I'm in Switzerland, registered interest back in may, was invited to order on 22 june 2012 and got an ORP number (ORP45xxx). No news, nothing. I guess there is some room left to improve customer information...

It's certainly my impression that RS have fared worse, but we'll probably never know why.

Back on the 29th Feb, seemingly along with many others, I couldn't initally get onto the farnell site so went and looked at RS only to get the register interest page. Decided, no, I'm supposed to be able to actually order one and went back to join in DDOSing farnell.

So is there also the possibility that farnell taking real orders ramped up production quicker, leading RS to see lots of abandoned registrations of interest and therefore not ramp as fast ?

SoC allocation could also be interesting if one or other of them placed a big enough order early enough.

There's obviously some coordination happening between RPF, Farnell & RS to have things like opening to multiple orders happen on the same day, but again interesting that Farnell had everything enabled before the announcement and Mike@RS posting to the announcement to say they weren't quite ready yet.

Looking in from the outside lots of people will be thinking RS has dropped the ball (even if they really haven't) and just make any actual problems worse by defecting to Farnell on the hope of a quicker delivery. Who knows, in a couple of months things could swing back in RS favour.

It's certainly the feeling that ORPxx orders are being treated differently - or maybe just export.farnell.com orders. Difficult to tell what's related to local country stuff or just somehow lower priority on ORP orders.

Looks like the read my post above. I just received an eMail saying "Your Raspberry Pi has now been shipped from our warehouse." Yummy!

Maybe they got a big delivery today and they've been frantically packing them all day

Unfortunately, it looks like they didn't read mine...

uk site is now showing:

Edit: 12051 on au.farnell.com, but newark.com says 100 Expected to ship 30 Jul, 2012 so obviously some variability depending on location.

I received the mail, it's shipped ! That's great !