Sadly, I have been saying the same thing that there will be a big shortage of Pis since I first heard about Pi and visited their forums this summer.
So far nothing has changed. Delayed production, initial production run of 10k. It is being run as a hobbyist project(I am judging mostly from the Pi forums). Hobbyist project is not a bad thing, just not what the market is asking of this device.
At the moment, it seems like one mid-level guy at Broadcom, got some company support and got volunteers to help out.
Only saving grace would be, if someone higher up in Broadcom gets behind the project. The problem is that Broadcom does not want to really make these devices, it wants to sell its chips to manufacturers (who are unlikely to see much profit in making $25 devices when they can sell $100 devices)
Think Asus EEE line and how it trended upwards pricewise and netbooks in general..
All that said, the future is a bit rosier. Once the initial fixed R&D costs are amortized, we will see plenty of inexpensive devices like this in the next 2-3 years.
So far nothing has changed. Delayed production, initial production run of 10k. It is being run as a hobbyist project(I am judging mostly from the Pi forums). Hobbyist project is not a bad thing, just not what the market is asking of this device.
At the moment, it seems like one mid-level guy at Broadcom, got some company support and got volunteers to help out.
Only saving grace would be, if someone higher up in Broadcom gets behind the project. The problem is that Broadcom does not want to really make these devices, it wants to sell its chips to manufacturers (who are unlikely to see much profit in making $25 devices when they can sell $100 devices)
Think Asus EEE line and how it trended upwards pricewise and netbooks in general..
All that said, the future is a bit rosier. Once the initial fixed R&D costs are amortized, we will see plenty of inexpensive devices like this in the next 2-3 years.