It seems almost impossible to buy a Pi 4 for a reasonable price at the moment, why? I know computer hardware is in somewhat short supply but other SBCs (such as the Beaglebone) are readily available at normal prices so what's happened to the Pi?
I have no inside knowledge, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation have some degree of control over the fab of their SoCs, either in 40nm (Pis 0-3) or 28nm (Pi
4). What they don't control is the supply of the other parts, notably the memory chips, the wifi parts (which used to be Broadcom until those were sold off to Cypress), the USB hub/ethernet chip (Microchip), and general power supply components.Through 2021 we've had a lot of sourcing problems with middle-tier parts from the likes of Microchip, TI, ST, and similar. Not the main processors, but hit things like voltage regulators, microcontrollers, USB and ethernet parts.
I don't know what it might be but I suspect something like that is the problem.
They did say they were going to de-prioritise some models in favour of others:
Theo
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