So so so sad news, but it is a constant: products popularized on goodwill, for the great benefit of society, becoming a cash machine business at all cost.
If they need more money for r&d or improved production quantities, they could:
- Raise prices
- Ask for donations
- Allow for pre-orders
Because, in the end, investors will not "fund" the business for "charity". They will expect profit and multipliers on the company value. So, in the end, they will still have to raise prices, have more proprietary things or cut corners...
Prices are increasing in approach you mentioned also. Coming to proprietary parts, there are so many public listed companies strong in open source like Redhat,
I'm annoyed that you just can never get the latest model of raspberry pi at retail. Even today, you can't buy a raspberry pi 4 which came out in June 2019.
People blame the scalpers but I blame the organization for not producing enough or underpricing it. There's no "benefit to society" if people can't buy the product.
Something needs to be done to achieve the mission. Hopefully an infusion of money will help them make raspberry pi more available without going through scalpers.
People hate "scalping", even giving it this bad name, but I think that they just don't understand the economics.
It is an important part of an economy and helps reduce scarcity by bringing a product's price closer to what it should be is a market economy.
A vendor doesn't know what the free market price for something is. They have to guess, this is speculative. If they guess low they get shortages and if they guess high they have unsold inventory.
The scalper is doing you a service. They're securing you access to a scarce product. You're paying for that service. You are also deciding that the benefit of this is worth more than the price you're paying for it. In exchange, the scalper is rewarded the difference between cost and secondary sale price. Remember, the scalper is also speculating that they know better than the original vendor what the item's sale price should be. If correct they are rewarded for this risk.
I kinda don’t understand why at least online there are no preorder queues for items out of stock. Seems that and purchase limits would prevent this kind of behavior.
> People blame the scalpers but I blame the organization for not producing enough or underpricing it. There's no "benefit to society" if people can't buy the product.
Then buy a Beaglebone?
The problem that the Beaglebone folks bumped into is that if you don't make the hardware stupid cheap (<$20, and probably <$10), people won't buy it and form a community around it.
Of course, if you make it too cheap, then you really don't want to sell all that many of them since you're losing money on each one.
I don't see that happening. The benefit of the Raspberry Pi is, and has always been, the software and community support.
There's loads of pi clones and cheap SBCs out there - Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Olimex etc. But none of them have got the traction - and most crucially, the community support - of the RPi.
Maybe if a Chinese company with the same level of community involvement and support (Pine?) launched, they would have a real competitor. But right now it seems like there's endless clone SBCs, none of which have any real traction.
The cheap Chinese stuff has always been there: Banana Pi, Orange Pi, etc. It's an open-source SBC and even with all the other cheaper/higher capacity/faster alternatives available I chose the Raspberry Pi because I believe in the mission.
Most of these 'cheap' SBCs are not supported by the mainline kernel or even by bootloaders such as u-boot. Which means you're stuck with a hacked-together Linux image, and no way to update or replace it. By contrast, the latest Raspbian release has replaced many formerly proprietary components with open ones. This involves some temporary breakage for existing users, but also improves support throughout the ecosystem.
12 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 39.6 ms ] threadIt is like what happened to Mozilla.
Let's hope that the listing will not happen.
- Raise prices
- Ask for donations
- Allow for pre-orders
Because, in the end, investors will not "fund" the business for "charity". They will expect profit and multipliers on the company value. So, in the end, they will still have to raise prices, have more proprietary things or cut corners...
People blame the scalpers but I blame the organization for not producing enough or underpricing it. There's no "benefit to society" if people can't buy the product.
Something needs to be done to achieve the mission. Hopefully an infusion of money will help them make raspberry pi more available without going through scalpers.
It is an important part of an economy and helps reduce scarcity by bringing a product's price closer to what it should be is a market economy.
A vendor doesn't know what the free market price for something is. They have to guess, this is speculative. If they guess low they get shortages and if they guess high they have unsold inventory.
The scalper is doing you a service. They're securing you access to a scarce product. You're paying for that service. You are also deciding that the benefit of this is worth more than the price you're paying for it. In exchange, the scalper is rewarded the difference between cost and secondary sale price. Remember, the scalper is also speculating that they know better than the original vendor what the item's sale price should be. If correct they are rewarded for this risk.
Then buy a Beaglebone?
The problem that the Beaglebone folks bumped into is that if you don't make the hardware stupid cheap (<$20, and probably <$10), people won't buy it and form a community around it.
Of course, if you make it too cheap, then you really don't want to sell all that many of them since you're losing money on each one.
There's loads of pi clones and cheap SBCs out there - Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Olimex etc. But none of them have got the traction - and most crucially, the community support - of the RPi.
Maybe if a Chinese company with the same level of community involvement and support (Pine?) launched, they would have a real competitor. But right now it seems like there's endless clone SBCs, none of which have any real traction.