No pi stock anywhere and delivery times out to end 2023!

I am not sure if this is directly related to the crude oil topic. I bet more important is the shortage of electronic components and high shipment prices.

How was this said: We know that they lie to us. They know that we know. We know that they know that we know. And they know this and despite of it they still lie to us.

It is not so simple ... you need also land. It is worst case - really. If you have to grow potatoes the revolution would be already over. It all reminds me of Erich Maria Remarque somehow ... but people forgot reading good books.

Same to you

Population can and must grow forever

This comes down to what I've heard referred to as "trout management": Dangle something shiny with a hook in it in front of them, and they'll strike every time.

There's a sucker born every minute. -- P.T. Barnum

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. -- Edward Abbey

And you.

F*ck Python.

At heart the problem is that the Pi's are too cheap. If they priced them according to traditional supply/demand economic rules then they would have just increased the prices to compensate. In fact Pi retailers do that anyway by bundling in over-priced extras, but because the cheap deal on the board alone is theoretically still there, us buyers are tempted to seek that out.

If you went into a store wanting to buy a new TV, you wouldn't be hunting around to try and find the one being sold without a remote and cables at 1/3rd the price, would you? Nevertheless they've probably got the same sort of high profit margins on those TVs that Pi sellers have on their bundles, you just haven't got a company like the Pi Foundation (or whatever their business arm is now called) telling you what you _should_ be paying.

So when you can't buy TVs, _that's_ the end of the civilisation. :)

Not that I object to fixed pricing on board-only Pi sales, I think it's great. You just need to be realistic about it.

If someone really believes in all this, then they should invest in oil companies and buy the land with their profits.

It's not really related to that. It's because of supply chain problems with component parts. The parts themselves are often not that notable, but without basic things like voltage regulators you can't ship product. It is also nontrivial to redesign for a different part that you *do* have in stock.

This same problem affects products all across the marketplace. The problem is that that those $0.10 voltage regulators are also used in things like car brake controllers, and you can't ship a car if the brakes don't work.

No amount of supply and demand economics will fix this. It takes several years to build a new semiconductor fab and the existing ones are running flat out, so people can't just respond to the market demand and build more parts.

You also can't increase prices to compete - if the competition for that $0.10 part is GM producing $50,000 cars, there's no way you can get any stock to compete.

As it is, semiconductor vendors are locked into supply contracts so it's not strictly a case of who has the most money gets the most parts. But it makes it very hard to plan production unless you can put in new supply agreements in place a long way ahead - but that's hard to do if you can't accurately know your demand.

It is made worse by everyone scrambling around trying to source their parts from anywhere, with the result that people are placing three orders in the hope of one being fulfilled soon, but then eventually they have a surplus of parts hanging around in their inventory. So demand is actually worse than what manufacturers really need.

Doubling the price of a Pi would slacken off demand for Pis a bit, but ultimately it would not get them made any faster. It will take slacking off the world demand for semiconductors before things get better.

Nothing to do with the price of oil, by the way.

Theo

Yes good points. I didn't mean to suggest that increasing the price would allow more to be manufactured, only that the ones that are being manufactured are going into bundles with over-priced accessories rather being sold on their own because the Pi Foundation sets a fixed retail price for the boards that doesn't reflect the shortage.

People keep saying that they can't buy a Pi, but in Australia there have always been stockists of bundles, it's just that people demand stock at the board-only price. Similarly there have always been Chinese sellers offering Pis at marked-up prices on Aliexpress and Alibaba, though I'm not sure how legit those are (the reviews seem convincing). So it's not that you can't get them, just that the board-only price doesn't incentivise retailers to keep them in stock when supply is restricted.

PS. I know the Pi quantities are very high, and there's a lag between component stock and boards on shelves, but the voltage regulator used in the Pi Zero W doesn't seem all that scarce at the moment

There is also a global shortage of available shipping containers caused by the pandemic and slowly getting resolved. This has resulted in many delays and price increases (supply and demand means containers are a lot more expensive than they were) and probably has more to do with Pi board shortage than the semiconductor shortages.

People are selling them on ebay for over £200 ($240). At that price I might as well pick up a complete refurbed desktop Intel PC...

I'm trying...

Yes, but this is not an inflationary shock, it's a supply-side shock.

If the price of your input commodities like oil goes up, you have to raise the prices of your products. But you can still make the same products you did before, as long as they sell at the higher prices.

If you can't get the parts for your products, it doesn't matter how much money you have or what you price your products at, you can't make any.

(unless you're a trillionaire and can build your own entire supply chain from scratch, but even that takes years)

Theo

I have ssen an article that claims that it is less supply sidee shock than preferential customer treatment. Pis are used commercially and that is who is being supplied on contract - us hobbyists get what's left over, essentially

Here's an example of what issues you can run across when doing such a substitution:

https://frame.work/blog/solving-for-silicon-shortages

Yes, that was straight from Ze Big Boss:

The supply side shock is industry-wide. It affects *everyone*, not just Pis, which are an insignificant product line in the grand scheme of things.

This is why the price of new and used cars is through the roof because there aren't many new ones being made, despite strong consumer demand.

If you have limited production volume, you have to decide where to prioritise selling the units you have. For example Google didn't launch the Pixel 5a phone anywhere except US and Japan - not worth launching a phone you can't make enough of. Auto manufacturers like Tesla and GM are building more premium product because, if you can only build a small number of cars, might as well build $70,000 cars not $30,000 cars.

If it was simply inflationary, GM would just pay the doubled price of the $0.10 part and add it onto their costs. Nobody cares if their car is now priced at $30,000.10. But lack of parts means you can't build the car at any price (and recertifying to use different parts is extremely costly).

In the Pi case, the Pi folks are picking who to supply to based on this downstream equation. If the Pi is used industrially as a component in some bigger product, better to allow that product to ship and suffer the hobbyist whose use is essentially discretionary.

Theo

Why is there this chip/fab shortage? For sunflower oil it's rather more clear ...

There's a shortage of shipping containers - fall out from the pandemic - which has jacked up the price of them a *lot*. Which means there's a shortage of *everything* that has to be shipped *and* everything costs more to ship which gets passed on or swallowed hitting profits hard.

There also aren't enough high end 7nm fabs (they're rather expensive to build) to meet the demand, but that's another problem that only affects high end chips like big memory chips and the top end processors.

There is a pandemic. It seemed like there was going to be major downturn, so manufacturers like auto makers thought they were going to sell less product. As a result they cancelled their chip orders. However, stimulus money dropped from governments which kept economies afloat. At the same time there was extra demand for WFH and home-school equipment like laptops, as well as cars (safer than taking the bus). So not only did demand not drop off, it increased. That combined with COVID lockdowns (eg Shanghai at the moment), staff off due to COVID, and difficulty of social distancing inside facilities, meant production was additionally constrained.

The result was that JIT fell apart. As manufacturers saw they couldn't get parts on a JIT basis they started building inventory, which was previously very slim. Additionally, due to the vagaries of supply manufacturers started hoarding: not just place an order for next week's parts, place an order for the next year's parts and place it with three suppliers in the hope that one will fulfill.

That's not really relevant for parts which are air freighted, which tiny chips are likely to be. Although there was a point at which air freight capacity was restricted due to lack of passenger flights.

While there was tightness at top-end fabs due to demand for laptops etc, a lot of the parts we've been having difficulty getting are more basic: microcontrollers, analogue parts, ethernet chips, etc. People like TI and Microchip were very badly affected. I can't say I noticed a tightness in memory chips, which are commoditised and on different processes from others, but maybe there was.

Theo

Manufacturers run pick and place lines with reels of parts, in that case a reel is 3000. Most of the vendors there don't have enough parts for a full reel - you can't run much of a production line with a part reel.

Digikey has 125k. But the Pi sells 500k a month, ie 125k a week. So that's enough for a week's worth of units. Not to be sniffed at, but not a long term solution.

Pi4 is 28nm, the other Pis are 40nm. That's pretty mature these days (a decade or more old). I'm not sure what regular microcontroller parts are fabbed on - maybe 65 or 90nm? But anyway, the Pi is not on the same lines as the latest 7nm chips for phones or laptops.

Theo

Thanks for the info, guys. Is this likely to ease any time soon? Probably not if JIT has gone.

Given the quantities, they probably order the regulator chip directly from manufacturer (they obviously do for the SoCs) anyway. But you wouldn't expect chip manufacturers to preference supplying distributors over big device manufacturers, and if they did you'd expect distributor stock to sell out quickly - not have over a hundred thousand sitting around in stock.

For sure. It would be interesting to know more about chip manufacturer capacities, but much of the info is likely to be considered trade secrets. 40nm may be mature, but does it still cost much more to build a 40nm fab than a 90nm fab?

Anyway stock of simpler devices like voltage regulators and logic chips doesn't seem to have been nearly so badly affected as microcontrollers. Which suggests to me that not every modern chip fab is able to pump out the more advanced chips, or else stock would have become more constrained across the board as they all switched to making the chips that were selling out. But there are a lot of factors at play, no doubt there's more to it than that.