I sold a second hand Pi Zero W (v1.3) with a broken camera connector for over $40 on eBay recently. Broken (as in LEDs come on solid, no HDMI output, or completely dead) Pi 3s are going for similar prices in the $30-60 range. It's all a bit mad.
I heard a rumor floating that the problem is Broadcomm now wanting the Pi foundation to cough up full price (because for the longest time they were receiving a charity discount) now that Pi is producing their own SoCs (the RP2040 is getting their feet wet, and what pissed Broadcom off).
I understand, but part of the draw of Raspberry Pis is the price. When that price goes up by 20x, I can't imagine very many scenarios where that would still be worth it, regardless of the size of the community.
The problem is that you have people with these bots at all, and it should be clear that in the absence of mitigations, these networks of bots can be trivially retargeted.
Speculation, and artificial scarcity through predatory automation is the issue.
No one wants to concede that though, because that'd put a giant spotlight on what is a disproportionate part of the finance industry, and start prompting serious questions around whether or not this type of thing is desirable behavior worthy of tolerance from them.
"artificial scarcity through predatory automation"
It's not artificial scarcity, though. The number of Pis or PS5s that get into the hands of end users is determined by the manufacturers. The scalpers only affect the allocation. Rather that the devices being allocated randomly among folks willing to pay the sticker price, they go only to the ones willing to pay the most.
That’s true but these major scalping operations often ship internationally. The ps5 would get bundled and go to Asia and the Middle East. I think the market for these scalped goods state side is shallower than you would expect.
Ergo... Artifical scarcity (of Pi's at MSRP) created by (non-practicing) scalpers (arbitragers, as they like to be called) reestablishing a price point, far in excess of what is reasonable, basically undoing the actual feat of engineering that resulted in such a cheap system in the first place.
The bit people don't realize, is finance draws in people like this, and does the same thing, day in, day out. No value extraction opportunity left unexploited lest one "leave money on the table".
These people are a significant contributor to why we cannot have nice things.
At most I have set the subject being modified to (Pi at MSRP) from what you were operating on, (the Pi, no price included). The conjunction of Pi at a pricepoint, was the endgoal of the engineering process.
Nothing about the meaning of the word scarcity has changed. What you seem to object to is that I don't accept the practice of decoupling the price point from the output as being morally desirable/defensible to have from the original intent of the engineering process. If someone builds a thing and stands by that price point for the express purpose of making that available at that price point, going the ideal market way you suggest is essentially socially parasitic.
They set out to make a $15 bundle of compute. Jerks with automation come along, clear out that unit of compute at $15 and plop it at a price point greatly in excess of the original intent.
I do not hold that one that does so is immune from being called a burden, because they read an economics book once. Your point, if granted, is bollocks. It admits it is perfectly fine to take things priced at cost, and jack the price up sky high despite the fact we nailed the engineering to make it that cheap.
I am not willing to concede that. I'm sorry. Your point is rubbish. Even if most of the market operates that way, we'd almost universally be better off if everyone just stopped doing that.
Left unaddressed, the pattern of behavior siphons capital from those just trying to get by plying a trade, to those looking to capitalize on someone else leaving money on the table.
Which is again, as previously stated, rubbish. If you've got nothing more to say, that's fine. It's just another case of a potential Sinclairism. It being hard to get a man to understand something his livelihood is dependent on them not understanding.
But don't try to say I redefined anything. I most certainly did not.
The existence of such scalpers rather shows that the price set by the producer is too low for the given rate of production (i.e. there is more demand than supply for the given price).
In an ideal market, the producer would increase the price and get more profit. But since this action is not taken by the Raspberry Pi foundation, other market participants (scalpers) appear that attempt to profit from this price difference between then price set by the producer and the price that can be achieved on the market.
Thus, the existence of scalpers is rather a symptom that shows that the producer could set the price higher (and thus balance supply vs demand).
Your ideal market, of course, proving why we cannot have nice things. As the moment somebody puts in the work to engineer a package so hella cheap that anyone can afford it, and start to actually do so, ideal market theorists pour in undoing the entire thing, lest money be left on the table.
Demand that outstrips supply does not necessitate a price increase must happen. Sometimes, the entire point of such an arrangement, is to render something accessible to individuals otherwise priced out.
Let us not trouble ourselves trying to justify economic's desperate attempt to legitimize greed as a virtue.
> As the moment somebody puts in the work to engineer a package so hella cheap that anyone can afford it, and start to actually do so, ideal market theorists pour in undoing the entire thing, lest money be left on the table.
The problem is that if you sell things insanely cheaply, the demand increases a lot, i.e. not everybody who would like to get one, is able to - this is called scarcity.
There exist two approaches to this problem (mixed solutions between these two approaches are also possible):
1. increase the production rate such that there is sufficient supply for the given demand - this is the solution that you, I think, wish.
2. increase the price of the product and be happy that producing cheaply and selling more expensively makes you a lot of money
In other words: the lesson that you miss in your post is that it does not suffice to engineer a package so cheap that anyone can afford it, but you also have to ensure that you have sufficient production capacity that you can fill the demand which comes from this cheap price.
It seems counterintuitive but the way you bring prices down is actually to bring them up enough to make scalping not profitable.
Scalpers have lots of costs associated with transaction. Tools, bots, ips, platform fees taxes, fraud etc. You by raising prices to 10-15% under the secondary market you basically price out the secondary and bring costs down for everyone
I’m starting to think that the RPi organization is limiting supply intentionally. How are companies like MinisForum able to keep shipping minipcs with vastly more complex hardware? It just doesn’t make any sense
Prob upstream suppliers know the demand and are artificially limiting their inputs... idk why RPi org would care that much. Plus if it gets out that would damage their rep BIGLY.
Rpee doesnt control manufacturing of those chips. Broadcom/Avago is,and they didnt bother contracting new batches. Rpee fully controls rp2040 supply chain and you can buy as many as you want <$1 a pop.
The #1 threat to my business right now is the dependency on Raspberry Pis. I'm evaluating other SBCs for my embedded ML product (Rock Pi on the low end, Intel NUC on the high end).
Have you looked into the beaglebone products? I assume you're talking about the business listed in your about page? If you're doing any kind of stepper motor control ,the AM335X and AM57XX SoC families seem to have some pretty cool realtime units and cortex M mcus onboard.
The Raspberry Pi doesn't drive 3D printer motors - that's typically an ATMega, Duet, or another 32-bit ARM SoC like the boards you mentioned. 3D printer manufacturers typically distribute a 32-bit SoC with either Marlin or Klipper firmware. https://www.klipper3d.org/
I distribute an aarch64 Linux distro for the Pi (PrintNanny OS), which handles monitoring and automation tasks. The Pi also hosts a web GUI.
Yeah, I run a WebRTC stack and gstreamer+nnstreamer application to stream video from the Pi. I'm running a TensorFlow Lite model on-device for object detection. Getting that stack to run on a 32-bit SoC without an operating system would be tough.
That said, there are some incredibly talented people in the world advancing the field of "TinyML" https://www.tinyml.org/ - it's not like you're suggesting something ridiculous! There are already specialized camera + NPU (Neural Processing Units) boards on the market for specialized edge CV tasks. PrintNanny's workflow/automation requires general computing capability though, which rules out a lot of specialized CV boards.
There are around 3,000 people on PrintNanny.ai's waitlist blocked from trying the product, due to Raspberry Pi 4 supply issues.
I'm porting to Rock Pi and Intel NUC for enterprise support agreements, but am basically locked out of the self-serve / mid-market until I build equivalent tooling like Raspberry Pi's imager (but for Rock/Orange Pi). https://twitter.com/grepLeigh/status/1572683931769778176
Starting a business with off-the-shelf hardware like Raspberry Pi is extremely common, especially for a bootstrapped business.
Have you tried buying directly on the secondary market? You might be able to cut a deal with some of the reselling groups and buy in bulk at 20-30% below eBay
When was the price ever $7? Raspberry Pi Trading started selling them at $15[0]. The Amazon scalpers haven't sold the product you listed at less than $40 in a year[1].
There is no non-wireless version of the Zero 2 (at least as far as I'm aware). The board OP posted has never been available for purchase for $7. Even the 32 bit armv6l predecessor cost $10 at launch
And either way, as my previous post points out, the Amazon price history has never dipped below $40.
As others have said, these are essentially scalpers - the authorized retailers still have at the original price, but as a result are also sell out quickly whenever there's any stock. https://rpilocator.com is a tracker of availability in various sellers. But stock has been super scarce - i believe they are prioritizing business customers.
The orange pi line from Shenzhen is very nice indeed. Fully documented with sdcard images ready to go. Theres a clone of the pie zero 2 with a neat metal case and another softrouter design, that also has a metal case looks like a little mac mini. You can buy direct on the alibaba express store. 20-60USD depending on the memory config.
There is a lot of "over-demand" for RPis because many companies and universities mistakenly think it's the only way to do embedded Linux. The truth is that there are many cheaper alternatives out there that are more appropriate for embedded projects (ADC, PWM etc.)
Edit:
Forgot to add a link to this article that goes through some of the alternatives:
Most "how do I do X on the Raspberry Pi" questions are just "how do I do X on Linux" questions. Maybe there is some device specific stuff in the device tree, but if you're messing with that you're already in an advanced use case.
A lot of Raspberry Pi projects could just as easily be using BeagleBone Blacks. There's a pretty robust community around those products too.
I don't know that the Raspberry Pi Linux boards are particularly notably well documented compared to competitors. Maybe I'm just unaware, because it generally runs Linux well and causes few problems.
I will say that I think their support for the Pico microcontroller is pretty exceptionally high quality.
The last time I tried some pi derivative, many softwares doesn't work on them. If there is a fix, it usually involve self compiling the broken software, along with some of their dependencies. Of course they're all using different build system that you have to learn. The labor cost of that is probably greater than the cost per unit of the hardware. Especially since pi-based products are necessarily low volume.
As far as I know, various Pi models are still for sale at the "proper" price at their physical store in Cambridge, UK (with per-person limits on purchases). Now obviously it's generally not worth the trip out there just to buy one, but if you're in the south-east of England and are planning a weekend away anyway, you could do worse...
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadIdk who needs them so badly to pay these prices just use a different board
Speculation, and artificial scarcity through predatory automation is the issue.
No one wants to concede that though, because that'd put a giant spotlight on what is a disproportionate part of the finance industry, and start prompting serious questions around whether or not this type of thing is desirable behavior worthy of tolerance from them.
It's not artificial scarcity, though. The number of Pis or PS5s that get into the hands of end users is determined by the manufacturers. The scalpers only affect the allocation. Rather that the devices being allocated randomly among folks willing to pay the sticker price, they go only to the ones willing to pay the most.
Obligatory, and apropos:
https://xkcd.com/1499/
The bit people don't realize, is finance draws in people like this, and does the same thing, day in, day out. No value extraction opportunity left unexploited lest one "leave money on the table".
These people are a significant contributor to why we cannot have nice things.
I have nothing more to say.
At most I have set the subject being modified to (Pi at MSRP) from what you were operating on, (the Pi, no price included). The conjunction of Pi at a pricepoint, was the endgoal of the engineering process.
Nothing about the meaning of the word scarcity has changed. What you seem to object to is that I don't accept the practice of decoupling the price point from the output as being morally desirable/defensible to have from the original intent of the engineering process. If someone builds a thing and stands by that price point for the express purpose of making that available at that price point, going the ideal market way you suggest is essentially socially parasitic.
They set out to make a $15 bundle of compute. Jerks with automation come along, clear out that unit of compute at $15 and plop it at a price point greatly in excess of the original intent.
I do not hold that one that does so is immune from being called a burden, because they read an economics book once. Your point, if granted, is bollocks. It admits it is perfectly fine to take things priced at cost, and jack the price up sky high despite the fact we nailed the engineering to make it that cheap.
I am not willing to concede that. I'm sorry. Your point is rubbish. Even if most of the market operates that way, we'd almost universally be better off if everyone just stopped doing that.
Left unaddressed, the pattern of behavior siphons capital from those just trying to get by plying a trade, to those looking to capitalize on someone else leaving money on the table.
Which is again, as previously stated, rubbish. If you've got nothing more to say, that's fine. It's just another case of a potential Sinclairism. It being hard to get a man to understand something his livelihood is dependent on them not understanding.
But don't try to say I redefined anything. I most certainly did not.
In an ideal market, the producer would increase the price and get more profit. But since this action is not taken by the Raspberry Pi foundation, other market participants (scalpers) appear that attempt to profit from this price difference between then price set by the producer and the price that can be achieved on the market.
Thus, the existence of scalpers is rather a symptom that shows that the producer could set the price higher (and thus balance supply vs demand).
Demand that outstrips supply does not necessitate a price increase must happen. Sometimes, the entire point of such an arrangement, is to render something accessible to individuals otherwise priced out.
Let us not trouble ourselves trying to justify economic's desperate attempt to legitimize greed as a virtue.
The problem is that if you sell things insanely cheaply, the demand increases a lot, i.e. not everybody who would like to get one, is able to - this is called scarcity.
There exist two approaches to this problem (mixed solutions between these two approaches are also possible):
1. increase the production rate such that there is sufficient supply for the given demand - this is the solution that you, I think, wish.
2. increase the price of the product and be happy that producing cheaply and selling more expensively makes you a lot of money
In other words: the lesson that you miss in your post is that it does not suffice to engineer a package so cheap that anyone can afford it, but you also have to ensure that you have sufficient production capacity that you can fill the demand which comes from this cheap price.
Scalpers have lots of costs associated with transaction. Tools, bots, ips, platform fees taxes, fraud etc. You by raising prices to 10-15% under the secondary market you basically price out the secondary and bring costs down for everyone
The price jump is pretty annoying.
I distribute an aarch64 Linux distro for the Pi (PrintNanny OS), which handles monitoring and automation tasks. The Pi also hosts a web GUI.
Are you saying you don't think your software could run on a 32 bit SoC? That would surprise me, but you would certainly no better than I would.
Edit:
I didn't realize there was CV involved, that probably uses a lot more resources. Really awesome project, I hope the supply issues get better.
Yeah, I run a WebRTC stack and gstreamer+nnstreamer application to stream video from the Pi. I'm running a TensorFlow Lite model on-device for object detection. Getting that stack to run on a 32-bit SoC without an operating system would be tough.
That said, there are some incredibly talented people in the world advancing the field of "TinyML" https://www.tinyml.org/ - it's not like you're suggesting something ridiculous! There are already specialized camera + NPU (Neural Processing Units) boards on the market for specialized edge CV tasks. PrintNanny's workflow/automation requires general computing capability though, which rules out a lot of specialized CV boards.
Seems wired that you works run any size business off em and either not be able to just pay extra and pass on costs or switch to a different platform
I'm porting to Rock Pi and Intel NUC for enterprise support agreements, but am basically locked out of the self-serve / mid-market until I build equivalent tooling like Raspberry Pi's imager (but for Rock/Orange Pi). https://twitter.com/grepLeigh/status/1572683931769778176
Starting a business with off-the-shelf hardware like Raspberry Pi is extremely common, especially for a bootstrapped business.
[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/new-raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-2... [1] https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B09LH5SBPS
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-zero/
[2] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/
And either way, as my previous post points out, the Amazon price history has never dipped below $40.
Edit:
Forgot to add a link to this article that goes through some of the alternatives:
https://jaycarlson.net/embedded-linux/
A lot of Raspberry Pi projects could just as easily be using BeagleBone Blacks. There's a pretty robust community around those products too.
I don't know that the Raspberry Pi Linux boards are particularly notably well documented compared to competitors. Maybe I'm just unaware, because it generally runs Linux well and causes few problems.
I will say that I think their support for the Pico microcontroller is pretty exceptionally high quality.