I just can not seem to get one anywhere apart from 2nd user at inflated prices.
Yeah, it’s a bit rediculous
The global supply shortage of microelectronics continues, and sadly might take a while longer to stabilise.
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Yeah it’s a bit ridiculous. In fact, the problem is not so much the production volume (according to the RPI foundation, they manufacture over 400k units per month, almost 5m Raspberries per year !). The problem is that most of these units go to large scale industrial and corporate buyers and only a fraction of that is available to consumers.
I have used tools like rpilocator and they are totally useless and doing some Googling many raspberry users are a bit disgruntled as allocation of stock is near 100% commercial and the usual retail outlets have had extremely small sporadic stocks to none for over a year.
The announcements by Raspberry and supposed reasons in the way global supply has changed is not exactly truthful and it is leaving a bitter taste in some of the lesser members of the Raspberry Pi fan club.
Its sort of crazy attitude of raspberry to prioritise commercial interests to this level, whilst near turning their backs on the original maker market as this has left gaps and new opportunities from other vendors new product.
Making the problem worse is that some people / companies are also trying to buy up all stock reserved for consumers, hoping for a quick buck by reselling them at inflated prices.
I recently had a conversation with my local Raspberry supplier here (I finally managed to get an RPI4 !) and they told me that people trying to circumvent the buy limit per customer is a massive problem for them (with fake bot created accounts, delivery to PO boxes, etc).
The upside is that the RPI Pico W boards are now back in stock mostly ! Not the same as an actual RPI, but very nice little embedded board to play around with !
I think the scalping problem is also not exactly truthful as the limited qty per customer has been running for some time now.
The absolute ridiculous prices scalpers are selling for and the tiny qty’s that are available is just that there are near next to none available at retail.
Pico & Pico W is about all that is avail in any qty but have very specific low power use with occasional Compute CM boards that are likely not of preference and still extremely hard to get.
The Pi400 also is avail but for many maker projects its just a bad fit.
Raspberries dominance and advantage of the herd sharing PiOS, peripherals and economies of scale has started to show the bad side of monopoly.
Their products are amazing where my current fave of the Zero2W is absolutely unbeatable at its $15 price point, but if you can not source for such extended lengths of time it becomes null and void and any project is likely going to have to take this in consideration as its having a huge impact for many.
There are always alternatives. ODroids seem to be more easily available (I found several in stock). Or NUCs or even a simple self built x86/x64 setup with a cheap low power mainboard and CPU.
I can’t find cheap NUCs at all, where are you looking?
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Actually it might be already over and turning to glut if you trust recent reports 
A very recent article about the berries 
I guess the Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd is just “playing” capitalism 
and is preferring long-term revenues from long-term commitments (something that only commercial customers can offer 
)
Guess they are also “playing” capitalism 
PS.: Selling a Raspberry Pi 4-4GB for $250, write a PM if you are interested sold 
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I see a few NUC i3 systems (typically no disk and no RAM) for less than $100 USD on eBay.
Not too sure about NUCs (you probably have to hunt around used ones), I was mostly looking at self built x86 setups using something like a passive cooled Celeron on a H410 Express chipset. Easy to source, you’re looking at something like €/$ 200-250 for a full setup (MB, CPU, a little RAM, SSD, PSU). Obviously more expensive than a barebones Pi, but also a lot more powerful and a lot easier to get.
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With some luck some Intel Compute Stick type devices can be bought used for quite a bargain (or for $500 new on amazon). They are low power, tiny 
all in one devices. The ones I use for home assistant - smaller than berries, are powered with 5v micro usb and have no fan (aka silent) 
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It’s ironic, for years any discussions of “the Pi needs … feature” that was not for the lowest common denominator, the common refrain on the boards (including the mods) would dismiss the request along the lines “it’s not needed for the core educational mission/market.”
When it comes down to it, they serviced those “non-core” needs first. I’m actually am OK with that, the cash ultimately can fund the core mission in other ways, but just admit the hardware sales and the customer base has moved well beyond that.
Which indeed caused the raspberry to suddenly be very interesting for many types of (commercial) applications/solutions. So in the end because the community/makers screamed “we need more power, more ram, faster ethernet” and their wishes became true companies started to build products around it causing the shortage of raspberries for ordinary makers 
It’s said some poor souls are already starting buying products (they don’t need) just to scrape a RPI out of it 
Nothing sudden about it. I doubt the bulk of Pi sales have been to the “core” audience since the Pi3, maybe back to the Pi2.
I just found the “core mission” excuse more than a little lame.
For us the biggest constraint on the Pi has been lack of HW encryption support. In a world of tls everywhere it is (and was 3 years ago) a major limitation on the Pi4 when you need to move a lot of data. Luckily other SBCs don’t share that particular limitation.
Just a few hundred boards here though. In some ways it was been fortuitous in that we had already largely moved away from the Pi because of it.
What are you exactly looking for? An actual intel NUC or just something small? And of course, new or used?
PS.: Due to the issues of sourcing a RPi, I gave up on any project which requires one… It is really a shame how prices became inflated.
Nothing special, just tinker material. I’ve exhausted HA at this point
Time to redo your router then…
I most of the time look at cheap Thin Clients or Desktop Minis. The 6th gen i5 ones are going for less than 200 Euro with 8 or 16GB of RAM.
Look at the HP Elite X2 1012 G1 or G2, they have a nice screen resolution for a small amount of money as second hand units. Another user pointed out recently that the G1 without the screen running consumes 6 or 7W with HA running on it.
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