Raspberry Pi 4 for sale or for a donation, anyone?

Mon 24 Jan 2022, 15:00

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY NINE Pounds sterling - an Amazon price for a Raspberry Pi 4 8gb RAM starter kit.

Or just the board ONE HUNDRED FIFTY NINE on its own.

Surely no-one expects to sell them at that price? And if you'd wanted to build a utterly essential system around a cheap single computer board with all its attendant lower level of reliability from inevitable component failure (in fact Pi's are quite a lot more reliable than one would have expected from such a cost-conscious product, but I have had 3 failed boards over the years) then I would have bought a shipping box of 24 to have as swap-out spares or expect the management to issue a P45 or whatever they give to freelancers when told to push their boat off.

in the end, Pi Hut had some 4gb kits in stock again after there being nothing around xmas/New Year. 

Can live with a bit less ram, s'pose, but needed the USB3, and a bit faster clock speed won't go amiss. But didn't need the kits, just a board, but none available as bare boards. Some more plastic and minor e-waste, alas- but did need new video cable as have gone to Micro-HDMI format which admit to not knowing was a "thing" as would have expected video to shift to USB-C format for video output like everyone else is doing. Might just be a shortage of USB-C video bits for installing on system boards...?

Still cost me well over TWICE the price of a pair of Pi's from a couple or 3 years ago, but decided to go ahead anyway.

Way back in the late 90s and early 00s was "advising" a working party to HMG on the information super-highway. Yes really that's what the Oxbridge civil servants were calling it and in their minds eye. We were able to get over to the politicians, by and large, the relative slowness of building up physical electronic fabrication facilities as plant and an ecosystem of elements, and what needed to be done for a bit more national autonomy for the sector. The civil servant careerists were a stodgy lump and of a generation wedded to the MT theocracy for some whose generational formative years were about then. The reckoning then was up to 5 years to create a proper indigenous production capacity, so if that has gone down to 2 its an improvement but does raise the issue of quite how much is being subsumed into a "productive capacity "?