Raspberry Pi signs big-name sellers
Educationally inclined microcomputer maker Raspberry Pi today revealed that its ARM-based credit card-sized machine is to be taken to coders worldwide by two big-name suppliers. Lining up to offer the tiny machine come RS Components, part of London Stock Exchange-listed Electrocomponents Plc, and Premier Farnell's Element 14, a …
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Re: @James Hughes 1
I have a big stick you can borrow if you like. :)
Re: Re: @James Hughes 1
I accidentally ended up with two in my basket after trying to load multiple pages.
Still being the kind and considerate chap that I am went back though the whole slow and painful process to edit the qty in the basket (couldn't change it from the 'review order' page).
Was all excited when I saw that stock had been allocated to my order but then the delivery date shows as the end of March - I guess I missed out on the first batch, oh well.
Re: Re: @Bin Yin
just as an observation, isn't the difference between your prices the VAT? In the UK*, VAT is included at point of sale, so would that explain the discrepancy? 20% of 35 is 7, right?
*(I'm assuming that you are in the UK from your name, but you know what they say about assuming...)
Re: Re: @Bin Yin
The Farnell price includes the shipping cost. R-Pi tweeted that they had checked this with them and it's OK.
Re: Re: Re: @Bin Yin
Although the Farnell site did take multiple orders, they are being reduced to one per person post sale.
I'm going back to bed
Farnell's site is properly titsup, RS has allowed me to "register an interest" on the third attempt ignoring all the timeouts...)
RasPi's twitter feed says Farnell have sold out.
Looks like that's all there is for today...
Vic.
Re: I'm going back to bed
I managed to get to farnell at 6:04am, but by then it was preorders only.
Re: Re: I'm going back to bed
I do get the impression it was the classic view of queuing up for days with the person at the front of the line going "Can I have 10000 please?"
Next in queue, "Sold out sorry!"
Phew...
Didn't get through to Farnell's site before it melted down, but managed to "register an interest" for a RasPi with RS (if that was the wrong page, where the flip was the right one?).
I have a feeling I may be waiting a while longer for one of these little fellas than I anticipated... ah well, at least it proves there's interest in an ARM PC :-)
Well have now placed an order with Farnell, but it's stating "Further stock available in 30 days"
spent an hour trying to get through to either site on web and nearly an hour waiting for RS to answer the 0845 phone number... They just did.. just to say that they have come in a six this morning but know nothing about it or stock levels, try the website!!
not chuffed :(
Way to go RS and Farnell.
Not only will your names be more widely known after today (for all the wrong reasons), you will have fewer happy customers among your traditional userbase (because they can't order stuff in the usual way).
Don't attempt to claim you weren't warned either. Like most modern "management", I imagine you were warned and you chose to ignore the warnings and hope that all would somehow be well anyway, and/or that your incompetence would go unnoticed.
I can imagine the scene...
Management: "Oh yes, no problem - our systems are geared up to handle any level of traffic. Nothing to worry about."
Their Web-folk: [check volume of "Raspberry_Pi" posts on TweetDeck, and think] "We're in big trouble."
RS and Farnell were warned
the raspberry pi people say they warned RS and Farnell, who knows what RS and Farnell did with the warning.
the raspberry pi people re-arranged their own websites to simple static pages hosted by a well known hosting outfit in anticipation of the load. The raspberry pi sites are still up.
Farnell's website is still completely unresponsive. 0/10.
RS still has a "we're offline, please phone your local orderlines" static front page. 2/10.
The launch (and the associated sales website FAIL) has already featured on BBC Radio 4 morning news and the BBC News TV channel, and likely elsewhere.
Re: RS and Farnell were warned
Yes, they were definitely told to expect a LOT of traffic.
Obviously just not up to the job. Sorry everyone.
RS website now has a static frontpage
"Thank you for visiting RS Components.
We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with our website. You are still able to place your orders using the following order lines."
Would a dedicated static frontpage with a "For RasPi, click here, or for RS Classic, click here" and a *simple* *separate* sit for RasPI have been any use in these circumstances?
What (other than cluelessness and no budget allocated for prevention of PR disasters ) would stop a competent supplier from doing something like that?
Hoorah!
Been watching this project for a while, now it's on sale! And not just that, they made the Model A with the same ram as the Model B! I think this project is awesome, for education it's an ICT unit/cheap computer lab(+the fees for cheap-o-bargin-bin screens and mice and keyboards) and for home it's a HTPC and mini Python/Linux dev box. I don't really care if the website is down right now, I've waited over 3 years for this, a few hours is nothing :)
Registered interest.
Wonder if they'll ship it to my local branch so I can hover outside the door until opening time..
I'm somewhere between annoyance that RS and Farnell crashed and massively impressed that Raspi achieved that because both those sites deal with *large* visitor numbers and to crash them must mean it's a huge hit.
Perhaps, if the demand is UK demand, we're not quite as screwed as I thought we were.
If RS really do them at the promised $25 I'll use WP7 for a week
And Vista on my home PC.
Re: If RS really do them at the promised $25 I'll use WP7 for a week
I think they will have to offer them at the prices that Raspberry Pi state; it will (or should be) be in their contract terms. They might try to stiff you on the exchange rate though; time will tell.
Re: If RS really do them at the promised $25 I'll use WP7 for a week
Model A's are $25, all batch 1 are Model B's @ $35
Re: If RS really do them at the promised $25 I'll use WP7 for a week
UKP 21.60 for the model B according to their website (ex-VAT of course). That's $34.40 at commercial exchange rates - just inside their $35 target..
Re: If RS really do them at the promised $25 I'll use WP7 for a week
On the pre reg page for RS its listed as £21.60...
Learn from the Apple fanboys
Forget about the web. Go and set up camp outside their front door!
F**king Farnell
Bumped the price up to £26.55+Vat already!!
Re: F**king Farnell
Be fair, they've got to pay for a Pentium IV to finally replace the 386 they've been using for a webserver since 1923.
Re: F**king Farnell
Indeed. Tranche 2 will probably been even more expensive as they exploit supply/demand. I doubt RaspPi has much control over what they charge. So that's now US$42 for a model B (probably nearer US$50 as I don't think those sites include VAT).
Re: Re: F**king Farnell
Bollocks. Raspberry Pi have entire control over how much they charge.
@James Hughes Re: F**king Farnell
Farnell have invoiced me for £26.55 + VAT of £5.31 making a total of £31.86. (Further stock available in 30 days, or so it says.)
RS have my registered interest at £21.60 with no mention of VAT or delivery costs. The very stressed lady on the phone said they would be on sale from 5th March... She didn't even have a part/item number for it...
Thanks to every-one at the Pi shop, and try not to let the whingers get you all down. ;o)
Farnell
Are at least open again, but as AD21 points out, it's thirty-one quid - and 'register interest' only.
so much whining
ummm so you didn't get one in round one so what? i usually get up at 6am the one day i decide to sleep in untill 8 this happens! i guess i will just HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE NEXT BATCH
this isn't a 1 off never to be done again sale (i.e touchpads) its just the first phase and with this much intrest they will scale up production. stop bitching and be patient
Re: so much whining
Absolutely! What a lot of whiners.
This is a brilliant piece of kit for the price (Register interest at RS priced at £21.60). Even if the price does, indeed, go up by 50% (or more) it still represents brilliant value for money.
Quite happy to wait for the 2nd or 3rd batch to get my hands on one.
Re: Re: so much whining
Heh, I've been resigned to waiting a while because I want half a dozen. One for my nephew to see if it gets him interested in tinkering (he's at the right age where something like this could bite him with the geek bug), and the other five for myself to build a tiny dev/learning network and learn how to break/fix DNS/DHCP/NIS/etc as implemented in Fedora...
RS and Farnell?
So I'M guessing the $25 price point is a no-go then.
"Yay?" In Denmark, both Farnell and RS-Components are strictly B2B. So even if I want one to play with, they won't sell it to me.
$35 plus PSU plus case plus tax and shipping
I think when you add it all up it won't be significantly cheaper than many media players which sport a similar SoC.
Re: $35 plus PSU plus case plus tax and shipping
Perhaps, but how many media players can you gain low-level access to?
:(
Top tips for releasing highly sought after products via the internet:
1) Don't claim your webservers can handle anything and everything thrown at them, especially when you don't own them and have no direct control over them.
2) Don't release products at 6am local time. Where are the sysadmins? In bed. Possibly awake knowing how busy they are going to be today, after marketing and management make claims like "our webservers can handle anything!".
3) Think things through. Are the two websites in question (RS and Farnell) really going to be up to the job in hand? Yes, they are big companies, but I very much doubt they their web infrastructure sees frequent battering it going to get at this sort of event.
4) Link directly to the product. Don't get customers to go to a website and start searching. It increases the load on the servers no end. The front page is likely going to be the most heavy page on the site, and getting everyone to start running searches isn't going to help either.
5) Don't piss off your dealers. RS and Farnell are probably going to lose more money than they make through this exercise. Their 'proper', potentially large, customers are going to shop elsewhere, at least for today.
I don't want to sound bitter. I just didn't get what I set my alarm for. I will keep trying at work, but I suspect the sites will either be down all day, or will sell out before I get my hands on one. Oh well.
Re: :(
@qwertyqwe:
Actually, you *did* get the announcement that Raspberry Pi promised you which is strictly speaking the reason for which you set your alarm.
Not getting a guaranteed order for one of the first 10K units is a different matter, but then if both RS and Farnell have seen their sites falling over under the load I'm guessing there were >>10K people wanting one of those first 10K units, so plenty of folks walk away disappointed.
Don't get me wrong, I think you make some good points (well, I disagree with 5, because $%^& 'em - if RS or Farnell didn't want to be dealing with this, they shouldn't have agreed to carry the fscking thing. It's nobody's fault but their own if they totally failed to correctly plan for demand on a highly-anticipated product). But this is, fundamentally, a first-wave release of a gadget. Nobody was holding any guns to anyone's head, so let's park the disappointment and the entitlement issues and act like mature human beings. (YEah, I know, that's not what the internet is for, etc...)
Farnell and RS were warned to expect a lot of traffic. At least 100k people have expressed an interest in the device, so there are bound to be 9/10 people who didn't get what they wanted - but that should have been expected. My guestimate is that probably 150-200k people were trying to get the device at 6 this morning.
RS/Farnell They absolutely promised they would be able to handle the load. The RaspberryPi foundation are pretty pissed off about what has happened here - yet another broken promise, but at least its on sale now, and large scale production is up and running.
BBC Micro?
What are they trying to link Raspberry Pi to? Model A and Model B? Anyone else have a BBC MIcro Model A or B?
Re: BBC Micro?
David Braben (of "Elite" fame) is one of the people behind this project - the model designations are a reflection of the influence of the Beeb on his career (and how he hopes the RasPi will be used).
One per customer
and someone has already put 10+ up on Ebay for £39.99
Re: One per customer
Not sure where they are getting their supply from, so I would avoid buying from Ebay for the moment
Re: Re: One per customer
now 2 listings on ebay, one at £44.99 and one at £49.99
The eBayers can go hang
So, eBay sellers: you were lucky enough to bag one or more RasPis (thus effectively denying the machines to others who might actually, um, USE them), and you now have the brass neck to try and flog them to line your own pockets, instead of benefitting the charity behind the RasPi.
Yes, well, it's a free-market economy, so therefore I will exercise my consumer rights and wait a bit longer for the opportunity to buy a RasPi the "proper" way. I want one, but not enough to enrich a bunch of eBay scalpers.
(If I could combine the "V For Vendetta" mask with the "flame" icon, I would ;-) )
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