I love it how people are pissing on this as though it is a failure. Really, unbelievable. Here is a group of dedicated guys and girls that work their asses off to produce a $25 computer with more punch than you'd ever think possible for that amount of money.
Not only do they deliver, they are sold out in absolute record time with the sites simply collapsing under the load.
I'd chalk this one up as a success, definitely not a failure and I fully expect the second (and subsequent) runs of the RaspberryPi to have a similar effect. Kudos to Eben, Liz and the rest of the team, you guys really rock and I hope that you won't let the sourpusses ruin your fantastic day for you.
I've watched the RaspberryPi saga closely from day 1 and I'm very very happy to see it come to fruit ;)
Not to forget: they all have day jobs. People have been worrying for ages about how Raspberry Pi will deal with the demand and get out of a process of making batches, having them sell out instantly and then using that capital to build the next batch. Eben talks about why the RS and Farnell partnership is a big deal and will help to solve that problem in this video interview:
Agreed! The $25 price point is incredible, and selling 10K units in 10 mins is a runaway success! I placed my order and will happily to wait until April, until then I will continue my project(s) working on a BeagleBone ($89) and a PandaBoard ($149).
I'm reading Brian Bagnall's "Commodore: A company on the edge" at the moment, and it's quite interesting to compare the early days of the home computer to the increasing capability of charities and hobbyists to bring fairly large runs out the door today.
We've come full circle, from a situations where small companies brought out their own computer only for (some of them) to grow into giants and seemingly eventually put building computers (as opposed to just assembling them) pretty much out of reach of hobbyists as complexity increased, to a point today where more and more small run systems seems to be appearing (though now because support services from manufacturing companies and design houses are getting within hobbyist reach).
RaspberryPi is on the "higher end" in this respect, both in specs and in number of units manufactured, but I find it really fascinating to see this trend in general.
(sidenote: That book is a bit of a tough read, but at the same time it's a very fascinating look at a company that had such a massive impact despite being so incredibly dysfunctional... I knew they had "issues" already when I was a kid and read the odd rumor, but I had no idea just how bad things were)
This reaction is really surprising to me. The Raspberry Pi charity was set up in order to produce a product that could be used as an education tool. They have managed a spectacular feat, that has been 6 years in the making. This is a very exciting development but not just from a technical point of view. The Raspberry Pi represents the idea that computers are interesting to us intrinsically, that there is real value in providing a platform that allows for the development and satisfaction of a crucial intellectual curiosity. The true value of the Raspberry Pi will not be found in our mailboxes in the next few months. It will be in the possibility that the next generation will have something to hack on that prioritises learning and discovery over walled gardens.
Sorry for the preachy tone (it's not intended), I am sure that most people feel the same way (or something similar), but it feels like we have lost some perspective while getting up at 6am to order some electronics over the internet. This is a great day. (I have a son and the Raspberry Pi feels like the most exciting project I have seen to date)
Education might be the stated aim of the project but its not the limit of the device. This is a device similar to an Arduino except for the fact its got HDMI, USB, is about 700 times faster and in the order of 256 million times more RAM and its only 25% more expensive. Its a hardware hackers delight and a desktop capable computer. It is also a very real competitor for nettops which sell in the millions at a price point 5-10x higher than this.
It may very well be used by students to code, but that will be a niche it falls into right behind becoming the cheapest desktop capable computer ever built that isn't locked down. This could very well start a revolution in portable desktop computers that are really cheap. I personally think it is an exciting device but let down by the narrow vision of its application.
This is a very inexpensive product produced by a charity. How can they afford what it would take for a launch like this to run flawlessly? I work for a non-profit that does all it can to provide a high quality service at a below market price, so I have sympathy for these guys. If you want first class service from day one, expect to pay a little more than $35. Even Apple with their high profit margins has had difficulty with launches for high demand products.
Man, I looked at Twitter, replied to someone, and went off to do something else like ONE MINUTE before the "hey you can buy the pi now" tweet. Twenty minutes later both the people ready to sell me one were totally swamped.
Guess I don't get one from the first batch. Woe is me. Somehow I will survive!
You know, as problems for a startup to have go, "demand for your product is so strong the servers selling it go down within twenty minutes" is a PRETTY GOOD PROBLEM.
I am really disappointed about their choice of distributors. Neither Farnell's nor RS Components subsidiaries in Germany and Austria ship to private individuals, you have to be a corporate buyer in order to be able to order from them. And since they "have" local subsidiaries, the "international" sites of both companies don't ship to either country.
In short: in Germany or Austria, you cannot buy the Raspberry Pi unless you go through an intermediary. This seems to be a really bad choice for a platform aimed at education.
And judging by the Twitter comments, at least (potential) customers in Sweden and the Netherlands have the same problem.
I guess what bothers me is how they don't seem to care too much about not being buyable by private entities in a number of European countries, or how they at least didn't bother to check up-front...
Still, I hope I can get one of the next batches somehow
Maybe its different here, but I've been ordering from RS in the uk for years as a private entity. The site is targeted at B2B and makes it seem like you have to be a company but actually you don't really. I think I just put in n/a or something for company name on the registration page. You don't have to have a trade account, they take credit cards. Orders below £50 you pay £5 for delivery.
Private entities can place an order at the Dutch Farnell by email if the total sum is over 50 euros. See for instance [1]. I could not find similar regulations at the German Farnell site.
On one hand, old wisdom creeps in: "if you really want something done well, do it yourself". But on the other hand, if they happened to fail selling at raspberrypi.com, everyone and his dog would be accusing them of hubris and suggesting they should have relied on "verified distributors".
The only thing I'm a bit sad about, is that probably the distro companies will evade any consequences. And even if they didn't, it would probably hit some random guys and not anyone really responsible for the incompetency.
Edit: I think I would feel some evil (bad, bad me!) satisfaction if R-Pi Foundation would punish the distro corps by not letting them distribute any further batches of R-Pi for as long as possible. But again, that would probably hurt most the common employees, not the management.
One picks their partners. It's certainly not the first time things have gone badly wrong when picking a partner, and you'd think that as a bunch of techies they might have seen this coming.
It's clear they chose their partners based on their manufacturing chops, rather than their retail chops. To be fair, RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities.
Arguably what Raspberry Pi could/should have done was use Arduino's model of having licensed manufacturers and they could have sat in front of it, and, as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread, just ship giant boxes to Amazon to actually do all the dirty work. This would have covered the US, Europe and Japan (if you ship to all Amazon's fulfillment centers), which would have been plenty I think.
My guess is that the current batch will stay exclusive to the current distributors, but this mess will encourage the Foundation to add new distributors for all future product.
So the distributors will have some consequences: a smaller share of future orders.
If I'm reading it right, tonight will be the first batch of 10k, the 'later in 2012' release that we will be able to pre-order for will be from their licensed partners and not so limited in quantity.
I could be wrong, I can't seem to access any website claiming to sell it.
"But you don't have to wait. With our world class system you can be confident you can get what you want when want it. Did you know while you listened to this message you could have placed your order online."
The production partnerships are encouraging news. Here's hoping my predictions on the Pi being more of a boutique/hobby venture that couldn't meet demand are wrong. I never thought they had much of a chance 10k at a time with weeks in between runs.
Of course, their servers (at the suppliers) seem to be meeting their little digital Gods at the moment. They just went static at the org.
And after they spent the past couple of weeks cockily batting away concerns about how they'd handle the traffic load, too. "You're all talking like we don't know what we're doing" is the line I recall being used several times.
Supplier 1: RS Components redirected to a product interest page - no purchase option
Supplier 2: Premier Farnell redirected to a international region picking page with no US link - no purchase option
Traffic wasn't the real problem. People are familiar with lines and queues- I wait in a slow long line every time I go to the grocery store.
Seems like they simply did not test their launch with either distributer internationally. Combine that with months of hype and last minute server/traffic arrogance for an angry social mob.
Given the large amount of worry on this thread about getting one of the first 10000 I'm really looking forwards to seeing hundreds of blog posts and stories about people doing really interesting thing with their hard-fought purchases.
I'm only being half sarcastic. I really would like to see people do cool things with these. And I will be disappointed if it turns out that 9500 of them end up in a drawer after the first weekend.
I would fear more that 9500 of them end up on eBay at $200 per unit until the next batch comes along. I really don't like people profiting from squatting.
probably it's just a fixed message they have on their system (load balancers?) that pops up when the real webservers are meltin^H^H^H^H^H^H not responding :)
Arduino, while nice and useful (I used it more than once), it's much less than raspberrypi. Arduino's power comes from the community, nice IDE and a lot of examples that are easy to grasp even for someone who is not a CS major. It is wonderful if you want to make you off-shelf PC communicate with simple engines, many types of sensors, things like that, and it's easy to connect to Processing or puredata, it's basically what you get if you want an interactive art piece and don't want to mess with assembler, bootloaders, and whatever.
However, Arduino is 30 USD for ATmega, 20 I/O pins and a USB you can use to program it. Raspberrypi is 35 USD (1) for ARM as powerful as the one in iPhone, with 256 MB RAM, HDMI output, two USB ports you can use to connect peripherals, allegedly powerful graphic processors (though it's probably going to have proprietary bloby drivers) and an Ethernet ports. Oh, and some I/O pins too.
It's basically a general purpose computer, allegedly as powerful as Pentium III (2), as big as Arduino, and taking slightly more but still incredibly small amount of power.
For further comparison, BeagleBoard has slightly better connectivity but worse CPU and graphics, and is bigger, and is 150 USD (about 4x the cost). PandaBoard is faster but similar and is 170 USD (little less than five times the cost). And yesterdays Arstechnica article speaks about similar computer in shape of a small flashdisk with slightly faster CPU than raspberry and ! GB ram costing 200 USD.
This is like free.fr for ARM development boards. It doesn't mean Arduino is finished or something (it's best thing was always the simplicity - anything you can do with Arduino can be done with plain ATmega and some hacking and they're dime a dozen) but it's nice.
(1): though local prices vary. Here Arduino is listed as about 1 USD less than raspberry.
(2): I can't remember where I read that, and it might've been Pentium II, so don't quote me on that, plese
It's not really directly comparable to an Arduino - it's a full-blown ARM Linux computer, with HDMI, ethernet, and a couple of orders of magnitude more RAM than an Arduino.
It also has some limited IO available, if you're prepared to solder headers onto the board.
An Arduino is basically a whole bunch of IO, including PWM output and analogue input, that you can wrap up with some glue logic or send straight to a computer.
If you want to interface with a range of sensors/motors in a self-contained unit, a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino actually make a good combination - you can write your logic code in whatever language you like in a Linux environment, and use the Arduino to interface it with the real world.
BBC Radio Four's "Today" programme are talking about Raspberry PI right now. They haven't mentioned server problems yet, or the fact that it's sold out already.
What a tremendous failure. Why check with your distributors before going live? It's not even the traffic; RS never sold any and for the rare moment that you could get to Farnell, they were already (or always have been) out of stock from minute one.
The tweets from the foundation make it look more like Farnell actually took about 10 minutes to sell what they had. Nobody's quite sure whats up with RS yet.
The electronics suppliers are not used to this kind of traffic. I remember Ti's website grounding to a halt when I was first in college when they released a new kit for free, and in the past when they have done coupons for half off certain high value items. Interesting side note, Ti for its free samples uses Digikey to process them (same address, same exact boxes, packaging and onetime when I ordered a free sample I got Digikey note rather than a Ti note :P)
The traffic for those websites generally is very low, I can't imagine that they are ready for anything to what they are seeing right now.
I do wish they had also launched with Digikey my favourite electronic parts distributor. Their shipping is always top notch and their service is absolutely fantastic.
That wasn't the case for my last order from TI. I ordered there EZ430 launchpad kits and according to the shipping label it came from a TI office in malaysia. I was originally going to go through Digikey but they wanted 5x ($20 instead of $4) the price.
[+] [-] jacquesm|14 years ago|reply
Not only do they deliver, they are sold out in absolute record time with the sites simply collapsing under the load.
I'd chalk this one up as a success, definitely not a failure and I fully expect the second (and subsequent) runs of the RaspberryPi to have a similar effect. Kudos to Eben, Liz and the rest of the team, you guys really rock and I hope that you won't let the sourpusses ruin your fantastic day for you.
I've watched the RaspberryPi saga closely from day 1 and I'm very very happy to see it come to fruit ;)
[+] [-] asb|14 years ago|reply
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/02/28/2347222/raspberr...
[+] [-] lsllc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|14 years ago|reply
We've come full circle, from a situations where small companies brought out their own computer only for (some of them) to grow into giants and seemingly eventually put building computers (as opposed to just assembling them) pretty much out of reach of hobbyists as complexity increased, to a point today where more and more small run systems seems to be appearing (though now because support services from manufacturing companies and design houses are getting within hobbyist reach).
RaspberryPi is on the "higher end" in this respect, both in specs and in number of units manufactured, but I find it really fascinating to see this trend in general.
(sidenote: That book is a bit of a tough read, but at the same time it's a very fascinating look at a company that had such a massive impact despite being so incredibly dysfunctional... I knew they had "issues" already when I was a kid and read the odd rumor, but I had no idea just how bad things were)
[+] [-] felixfurtak|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fmstephe|14 years ago|reply
Sorry for the preachy tone (it's not intended), I am sure that most people feel the same way (or something similar), but it feels like we have lost some perspective while getting up at 6am to order some electronics over the internet. This is a great day. (I have a son and the Raspberry Pi feels like the most exciting project I have seen to date)
[+] [-] PKeeble|14 years ago|reply
It may very well be used by students to code, but that will be a niche it falls into right behind becoming the cheapest desktop capable computer ever built that isn't locked down. This could very well start a revolution in portable desktop computers that are really cheap. I personally think it is an exciting device but let down by the narrow vision of its application.
[+] [-] lancefisher|14 years ago|reply
Edit: Seriously, you send them a big box, and they mail out all the little boxes. Check it out: http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....
[+] [-] cicero|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fmstephe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djhworld|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|14 years ago|reply
Guess I don't get one from the first batch. Woe is me. Somehow I will survive!
You know, as problems for a startup to have go, "demand for your product is so strong the servers selling it go down within twenty minutes" is a PRETTY GOOD PROBLEM.
[+] [-] rmk2|14 years ago|reply
In short: in Germany or Austria, you cannot buy the Raspberry Pi unless you go through an intermediary. This seems to be a really bad choice for a platform aimed at education.
And judging by the Twitter comments, at least (potential) customers in Sweden and the Netherlands have the same problem.
http://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174752572194824192
http://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174779094783897600
I guess what bothers me is how they don't seem to care too much about not being buyable by private entities in a number of European countries, or how they at least didn't bother to check up-front...
Still, I hope I can get one of the next batches somehow
[+] [-] willyt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArnoVanLumig|14 years ago|reply
[1] http://nl.farnell.com/images/nl_NL/pdf/Particulier_voorwaard...
[+] [-] maayank|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akavel|14 years ago|reply
The only thing I'm a bit sad about, is that probably the distro companies will evade any consequences. And even if they didn't, it would probably hit some random guys and not anyone really responsible for the incompetency.
Edit: I think I would feel some evil (bad, bad me!) satisfaction if R-Pi Foundation would punish the distro corps by not letting them distribute any further batches of R-Pi for as long as possible. But again, that would probably hurt most the common employees, not the management.
[+] [-] Lewisham|14 years ago|reply
It's clear they chose their partners based on their manufacturing chops, rather than their retail chops. To be fair, RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities.
Arguably what Raspberry Pi could/should have done was use Arduino's model of having licensed manufacturers and they could have sat in front of it, and, as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread, just ship giant boxes to Amazon to actually do all the dirty work. This would have covered the US, Europe and Japan (if you ship to all Amazon's fulfillment centers), which would have been plenty I think.
[+] [-] waitwhat|14 years ago|reply
So the distributors will have some consequences: a smaller share of future orders.
[+] [-] scommab|14 years ago|reply
To me this is the key point. No need to fight through the rush tonight, there will enough to go around.
[+] [-] notatoad|14 years ago|reply
I could be wrong, I can't seem to access any website claiming to sell it.
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aespinoza|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomAnthony|14 years ago|reply
"But you don't have to wait. With our world class system you can be confident you can get what you want when want it. Did you know while you listened to this message you could have placed your order online."
[+] [-] mrpippy|14 years ago|reply
The Raspberry Pi is now listed on Newark/element14 (Farnell's US site): http://www.newark.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/dp/83T1943
It's $35, although there's also a 30 day lead time and a $20 handling fee (because it's shipping directly from the UK).
[+] [-] sitharus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryan-c|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|14 years ago|reply
Of course, their servers (at the suppliers) seem to be meeting their little digital Gods at the moment. They just went static at the org.
[+] [-] handelaar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicknyc|14 years ago|reply
Supplier 1: RS Components redirected to a product interest page - no purchase option
Supplier 2: Premier Farnell redirected to a international region picking page with no US link - no purchase option
Traffic wasn't the real problem. People are familiar with lines and queues- I wait in a slow long line every time I go to the grocery store.
Seems like they simply did not test their launch with either distributer internationally. Combine that with months of hype and last minute server/traffic arrogance for an angry social mob.
[+] [-] TomAnthony|14 years ago|reply
They tweeted at 6am to link to the page, then not since.
Farnell on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/farnellnews
They at least tweeted at 6.30 to say they are trying to fix the problems.
[+] [-] adaml_623|14 years ago|reply
I'm only being half sarcastic. I really would like to see people do cool things with these. And I will be disappointed if it turns out that 9500 of them end up in a drawer after the first weekend.
[+] [-] freehunter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xahrepap|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ecio78|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krelian|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glogla|14 years ago|reply
However, Arduino is 30 USD for ATmega, 20 I/O pins and a USB you can use to program it. Raspberrypi is 35 USD (1) for ARM as powerful as the one in iPhone, with 256 MB RAM, HDMI output, two USB ports you can use to connect peripherals, allegedly powerful graphic processors (though it's probably going to have proprietary bloby drivers) and an Ethernet ports. Oh, and some I/O pins too.
It's basically a general purpose computer, allegedly as powerful as Pentium III (2), as big as Arduino, and taking slightly more but still incredibly small amount of power.
For further comparison, BeagleBoard has slightly better connectivity but worse CPU and graphics, and is bigger, and is 150 USD (about 4x the cost). PandaBoard is faster but similar and is 170 USD (little less than five times the cost). And yesterdays Arstechnica article speaks about similar computer in shape of a small flashdisk with slightly faster CPU than raspberry and ! GB ram costing 200 USD.
This is like free.fr for ARM development boards. It doesn't mean Arduino is finished or something (it's best thing was always the simplicity - anything you can do with Arduino can be done with plain ATmega and some hacking and they're dime a dozen) but it's nice.
(1): though local prices vary. Here Arduino is listed as about 1 USD less than raspberry.
(2): I can't remember where I read that, and it might've been Pentium II, so don't quote me on that, plese
[+] [-] semanticist|14 years ago|reply
It also has some limited IO available, if you're prepared to solder headers onto the board.
An Arduino is basically a whole bunch of IO, including PWM output and analogue input, that you can wrap up with some glue logic or send straight to a computer.
If you want to interface with a range of sensors/motors in a self-contained unit, a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino actually make a good combination - you can write your logic code in whatever language you like in a Linux environment, and use the Arduino to interface it with the real world.
[+] [-] listic|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waitwhat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/default.stm)
(7:45am Wednesday 29th Feb)
[+] [-] noonespecial|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revelation|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] X-Istence|14 years ago|reply
The traffic for those websites generally is very low, I can't imagine that they are ready for anything to what they are seeing right now.
I do wish they had also launched with Digikey my favourite electronic parts distributor. Their shipping is always top notch and their service is absolutely fantastic.
[+] [-] yardie|14 years ago|reply