Shortages Prompt Raspberry Pi to Prioritize Commercial Customers
Bad news for Raspberry Pi buyers: Demand for the small desktop computer is so high the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been prioritizing orders for commercial and industrial customers over retail sales to individual consumers.
That means the Raspberry Pi 4 will likely remain in short supply at retailers, making the hobbyist computer difficult to obtain at normal prices.
Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading, revealed the news in a Monday blog post covering the supply problems facing the products. “As you will have noticed, it can be hard to buy a Raspberry Pi unit from stock at the moment,” he wrote.
According to Upton, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been able to manufacture “around half a million” single board and Compute Module products each month. But the foundation hasn’t been able to boost manufacturing due to ongoing “supply constraints” from the chip shortage.
At the same time, demand for Raspberry Pi computers increased in 2021. “We now have significant order backlogs for almost all products,” Upton said. “In turn, our many resellers have their own backlogs, which they fulfil when they receive stock from us.
“These backlogs absorb Raspberry Pi units as fast as (or faster than!) we can produce them, with the result that little of our production volume ends up being immediately available on reseller websites,” he added. “Where units do appear, bots often attempt to scalp stock which is then resold at higher prices elsewhere.”
The situation is so dire the foundation had to make a tough decision on which customers should receive Raspberry Pi units first. “Right now we feel the right thing to do is to prioritize commercial and industrial customers —the people who need Raspberry Pis to run their businesses—we’re
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