I picked up a Model B from Amazon earlier this month, here in the US. I have been really impressed with it, even though I paid ~$48. Very impressive device in such a little package. I used mine to make a WiFi garage door opener with node.js backend and iOS app to open our garage doors from our phone. So many more projects in mind.<p>Shameless plus as I just wrote a post about my project this weekend. <a href="http://itsbrent.net/2013/03/hacking-my-garage-with-a-raspberry-pi/" rel="nofollow">http://itsbrent.net/2013/03/hacking-my-garage-with-a-raspber...</a>
So, only one vendor, and they state back orders not accepted, and they state they have 0 in stock.<p>Which means it's not really on sale for $25 in the US.<p>I could make the same claim myself, that I am selling them for $25, don't have any in stock, and don't accept backorders. They wouldn't make it really for sale unless I am actually accepting $25 and shipping out boards. It might be convenient though if I give people a link to where I am selling other items, that's a lot of free incoming traffic without having to pay Google for AdSense clicks.<p>This is just cheap dishonest advertising for the company. A lot of people visiting the link will buy something else. Someone there has figured out a good way to make money is send out press releases to the tech press about their desirable but unavailable non-sale item, and hope for a bite. They got a bite - Cyrus Farivar at ArsTechnica fell for it. Sure, they had 50 in stock that were sold instantly. 50 that this company no doubt bought for more than $25 each and either sold as a loss leader, or simply charged more for shipping than they paid.
It has been amazing watching what people have done with the Model B. I'm actually considering picking one up just to play around with web development and all these mysterious languages I hadn't heard of before reading Hacker News, ie the *.js languages, and a personal trial of Django vs Rails.
What I would like to see is something like a Raspberry pi, but without any of the video/usb outputs or GPU/Soundcard.<p>So just a tiny server running Linux with an ethernet port.
I you can get the pi down to $25 you could probably get such a thing down to $15 or so.
Model A is very restrictive than the B, if you are even slightly serious to do sth of little weight with it. I wonder if A can withstand always-on torrent and/or a connected hard disk which is constantly filled by CrashPlan or Time Machine. One USB port is another big restriction. Kills my idea of making it work with two hard disk(without using a hub).<p>PS. It hurts to think that I am not buying it(B) because it costs ~$60 here(IN) and the original price being $35. Maybe I would have bought it if it was released for $60 and available here for the same cost. Played with it at a friend's place though.