Additionally, it looks like they won't sell boards (post-beta) until sometime early next year.

Source: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/389#comment-5402

"I don’t think, sadly, that you’re going to be able to give them away as Christmas gifts this year. We will, however, be making as many of these as we can sell (not just 10k) in the new year, so I suggest you get planning for birthdays, anniversaries and wedding presents!"

Yes this is indeed very disappointing. I guess I might have misunderstood most of the blog posts when they said they would be releasing by the end of this year, and that the prices were set to $25 and $35. So I guess we all have to wait for next year.

A couple month slips is pretty typical, especially for a project that is everyone's 'side-project' and not day job.

I'm happier with their open communication instead of having built it in private and released it suddenly one day.

I agree. Still I was hoping to get at least a couple of those by the end year... I have a couple cool ideas I wanted to use it for.

But I do agree. It is understandable. It doesn't make me feel better though.

This is a solid step in proving that the project isn't just a dream and isn't vaporware. Although I wonder why a plain board would be ordered, when it looks to be all very small SMT components that a hobbyist would have a difficult time with anyway?

They won't be selling unpopulated PCBs, only assembled boards.

Right, but on the blog post they say they'll offer a few to the community most likely. 100 seems a little excessive for a board test batch, but maybe it was the smallest order number they could get.

100 seems reasonable for QA when you are planning on making >10K right after.

They are auctioning these 100 boards (populated).

Exactly. You might make 10 for your early prototypes but it's not unusual to make 100 or more for the final test run.

No, they are going to populate them all, test them, then sell them.

We’ve made 100 of these betas, which will now be populated with components... Raspberry Pis from this very first, small batch, will be going on sale when they’ve been tested

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/389

100 boards doesn't cost all that much more than 10, IIRC.

Populating them takes 10 times as long, if you're doing it by hand. If you're programming a pick-and-place bot and loading up reels of components, that takes time too.

Sure, but nobody said you were going to populate all 100. The point is sometimes simply to have "enough" boards on hand for testing that you don't need to do another run.

A determined hobbyist can handle that stuff. As I understand, the only thing that really stops a determined hobbyist is BGA.

Which, actually, might be exactly what the square in the middle is. In which case they certainly will not be marketing bare boards.

Some BGAs are possible with the right size shims and a hot-air gun (even a cheap £20 gas iron with hot-air tip has worked in the past).

Debugging/QA is utterly impossible though (since it generally involves x-rays), so if it doesn't work, you get to start over.

Or a toaster oven and reflow controller a la the Sparkfun board (though a bunch of other hobbyist folks have done the same or similar).

Agree on the debugging part though.

Yup, I totally want to try my hand at it sometime, but the complete lack of debug/qa seems critical enough I wouldn't ever claim to be "able to do bga". Settle for "I did a bga once".

Unfortunately, my predictions have come true, volume availability of Pi will not happen this year.

At least we can take solace at the fact that the delays are unlikely to be as bad as with Pandora console.

Exciting!

I guess the proceeds of the auction will help them scale?

Even with support from Broadcom I'm sure at $25/piece there's not a lot of room for paying off their fixed costs.

It's also helpful that one of the guys involved owns a PCB manufacturer!