If the Raspberri Pi foundation doesn't want to sell you their product, there's no way you can force them to sell you one. That there are no blog posts probably just means that some exec from Broadcom told Eben not to post anything.
If he stopped supplying OEMs, nobody would lose their jobs. The opposite, in fact. More engineering staff and contractors and consultants would get work because these companies would have to re-develop their products to use an in-house SBC or any of the hundreds of industrial SBCs out there.
Everyone else can't do that. Your average hobbyist can't just call up an industrial SBC company and buy. That was the whole point behind the Pi (well, the whole point was using up shitty SoCs that Broadcom hadn't been able to sell, but that's beside the point.)
What's really going on is that Ebon is prioritizing large OEMs who use Pis because they don't want to be bothered spending R&D to develop their own embedded system.
Meanwhile he's fucking over every small guy. All the retailers who have lost all that revenue and associated accessory sales? Fucked. What about their livelihoods? What about the logistics people they employed? They apparently can all get fucked.
All the non-profits (like libraries, hackerspaces, schools, etc) who may have secured budget and grant money for Pi-based programs that now cannot be spent? Fucked. rarely can money secured for purpose A be diverted to purpose B, and more often than not, you simply lose the funding entirely and you lose that amount of money from next year's budget, too.
How about the thousands of cottage industry small entrepreneurs making a living off Pi-based products they've developed? Fucked.
How about all the researchers, using Pis for data collection and controlling experiments? Fucked.
How about all the people who had home or business automation who need to replace a damaged or fried Pi? Fucked.
But thank god we're saving jobs at those large corporations who went with Pis because it was a cost-saving measure.
The Pi Foundation isn't even particularly competent. Every single Pi model has had problems, and the Pi 4 had basic, obvious-within-minutes-to-anyone-who-tried-to-use-it problems with power because the Pi foundation fucked up their USB-PD implementation.
Ebon says they're making 6M Pi's a year but it's months between any US supplier getting Pis, which means he's doing way more than "prioritizing OEMs."
I doubt anyone foresaw that RasPi would be forced to ship less than 400k units across all their models monthly. The chip shortage is catching everyone by surprise, and we’re probably lucky RasPi is considered important enough to get a regular allocation of their BoM at all, given the low margins they’re operating on.
As I understand it, there are quite a few OEMs who have staff allocated to improving the Pi ecosystem as well, so it’s not like the educational and hobbyist markets gain nothing from their OEM engagements. RasPi has become the de-facto standard for the, “I need a cheap card that can run Linux in under 10 watts,” market in large part because of its robust support.
rPi stopped feeling like educational material when they moved on from whatever low price they were at the beginning.
You are not going to convince me that a computer selling for $150~300 each or whatever it is nowadays is "for education". An educational computer is something like an Arduino board, which apparently sells for $25~50 currently from some quick checking.
If I'm dropping two or three Franklins on a computer, I'd rather just get an older Intel NUC or something so I can take advantage of the much larger and capable Windows and Linux ecosystems.
yes, it sucks, but the performers (and the Pi makers) did the best they could to offer them to folks at a cheap price.
There is, actually. They can raise their price until supply equals demand
Instead, if they raise prices the difference will end on the foundation pockets, and they could use that money to ramp up production.
What they are doing right now reeks of either corruption or stupidity.
The official blog is just marketing fluff for the most part, almost never mentioning the fact you haven't been able to easily obtain one for over six months.
If what Eben told Jeff is the case, why not tell everyone on the blog, or some other public channel? "Ringing up Eben" is not an option for most of us.
I also think with prioritizing commercial customers, we should drop the ruse that this thing is an educational board. I honestly don't think education has been a majority of users for a long time, but perhaps i'm grossly mistaken here.
> https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/