Eben Upton and Raspberry Pi really sold out their user base.<p>When the shortage hit, Eben Upton declared that they’d be prioritizing sales to industrial users. The rationale seemed reasonable: “because if someone’s livelihood depends on raspberry pi then that’s who we’ll take care of first”.<p>As a result, Raspberry Pi may as well have been a dead computing platform for years to come, and still is. It’s impossible to buy.<p>After a while I came to realize that industrial buyers don’t deserve first priority. Businesses can take care of themselves. They have money and resources and ingenuity… they can work out alternatives to raspberry pi. They can adjust their designs and software to make do with other hardware.<p>Then images like this emerged, proving that Eben Upton had given so many raspberry pi’s to industrial users they could build giant clusters to demo for fun, neatly illustrating the abusive relationship where consumers were desperate for machines but Eben was giving them by the truckload to industry:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/scrumtuous/status/1582897358248910849" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/scrumtuous/status/1582897358248910849</a><p>And then I realized that in fact the people who really should have been priority one were kids and schools. Priority two hobbyists. Priority three industrial buyers.<p>It made me quite mad and really brought into focus that raspberry pi was built on kids, education and hobbyists, and Eben Upton and raspberry pi sold them out and continues to do so.<p>Eben had recently made noises about allocating some for consumers, but the lions share still goes to industrial users.<p>In fact raspberry pi is just an industrial computing company that has exploited its users and dropped them and sold them out literally.<p>Raspberry pi and Eben Upton don’t deserve your business. They treat their loyal community and children as quite literally third rate. Awful customer attitude.<p>Look elsewhere for little computers, don’t support this abusive relationship.
Whenever it does launch, I'm hoping to see significantly more memory bandwidth. It's the achilles heel of the current Raspberry Pi 4 design. CPU and GPU are severely memory bandwidth starved.