Where Are the Raspberry Pi Zeros? (i-programmer.info)

mikejuk writes: The Pi Zero was supposed to be available from November 26, 2015. It is now the start of February and all of the stockists, including the Pi Swag Shop, are still showing out of stock. That's two whole months, and counting, of restricted supply which is more than an initial hiccup. Of course you would expect enough to be made available initially to meet the expected demand. The Pi sells something in the region of 200,000 per month so what do you think the initial run of the Pi Zero actually was? The answer is 20,000 units. Of which 10,000 were stuck to the cover of MagPi and "given away" leaving just 10,000 in the usual distribution channels. And yet Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, commented: "You'd think we'd be used to it by now, but we're always amazed by the level of interest in new Raspberry Pi products," Well yes, you really would think that they might be used to it by now and perhaps even prepared for it. At the time of writing the Pi Zero is still out of stock and when it is briefly in stock customers are limited to one unit.
A victim of its own success, yes, but the real victims are the Raspberry Pi's competitors.

Comments

the Schedules

[Dave Whiteside]

https://www.raspberrypi.org/fo...
basically there are 2 re sellers in the UK and 2 in the US
they get alternative deliveries

Re:I can understand small first batches

[Midnight Thunder]

The use case is much closer to that of an Arduino, than that of the Rasberry B. So, unless you are looking to do embedded type stuff, then you are probably not the right market.

Re:I can understand small first batches

[bangular]

The zero is definitely in an awkward spot. It's so-so as a microcontroller replacement (no low power modes, limited number of analog inputs, inputs not 5v tolerant), but the price point makes it otherwise competitive. The ESP8266 is getting high level languages like Lua, micro python, and Basic and priced well. The "low power mode" sucks because it basically just resets the unit and doesn't have interrupt driven wake modes.

I bought a zero and it will probably be my only purchase. It just doesn't seem to do anything special.

Hindsight is grand

[thegarbz]

Well yes, you really would think that they might be used to it by now and perhaps even prepared for it.

Thanks for your opinion Mike. I wonder if you were in position where you sold 200000 of something, and then proceeded to develop a hugely cut down baby version of it, completely missing some of the most used features (USB ports) of the previous products, what do you think the initial run should be? Oh enlighten us?

Quite frankly I'm surprised they sold out, it's quite telling that one of the most popular projects on Hackaday is to add a USB hub back in to make it more useful.

Re:I can understand small first batches

[thinkwaitfast]

The arduino fits this role perfectly. I have a few years experience building remote data collection sensors and very little computation ability is required You don't even need to do calibration, just record raw data. I was doing this on a TRS-80 100 in the 1980's with no problem collecting data (about 2 dozen sensors) over a few months time. Where the rpi would come in handy is its ease of use of large storage space. I think you can do that with the arduino also, but have not tried.

One of the things I have planed to do with my rpi is to set up a remote station on a tall mountain about 12km from my house. I could set up a camera and talk to the whole thing over an xbee rs-232 tcp link (ppp) at 28.8kbaud. With a small solar panel this would run indefinitely and provide me with weather data and a view of the whole area.