I really, really hope I am wrong, but the first few batches will be woefully short of the actual demand.
Why?
No pre-orders to indicate real demand (Rasperry forums are more optimistic than an Amway convention).
No clue on what financing they have in place to handle the manufacturing.
I have a hard time believing they will do a run of 10000(need to find someone to front $200k+) boards, when the real demand is probably 100k+(at those $25/$35 price points).
What will happen they will have 1000 boards for sale early January and they will be gone in an instant (remember no pre-orders, means people will overwhelm their servers in a huge rush). Then we will wait another 2-3 months for a slightly bigger batch. Repeat until 2013.
Again, I hope I am wrong and hopefully someone at Broadcom who has experience with supply-chain is backing them.
While demand might be very high, the particular scenario you describe is not going to happen. Eben addresses the funding issue in this interview: http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=281 The trustees will be putting up the money for the initial run themselves. One of the trustees is Pete Lomas, managing director of Norcott Technologies.
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Also, they hope to be selling the model A for $25 and the Model B for $35.
I really, really hope I am wrong, but the first few batches will be woefully short of the actual demand.
Why?
No pre-orders to indicate real demand (Rasperry forums are more optimistic than an Amway convention).
No clue on what financing they have in place to handle the manufacturing.
I have a hard time believing they will do a run of 10000(need to find someone to front $200k+) boards, when the real demand is probably 100k+(at those $25/$35 price points).
What will happen they will have 1000 boards for sale early January and they will be gone in an instant (remember no pre-orders, means people will overwhelm their servers in a huge rush). Then we will wait another 2-3 months for a slightly bigger batch. Repeat until 2013.
Again, I hope I am wrong and hopefully someone at Broadcom who has experience with supply-chain is backing them.
While demand might be very high, the particular scenario you describe is not going to happen. Eben addresses the funding issue in this interview: http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=281 The trustees will be putting up the money for the initial run themselves. One of the trustees is Pete Lomas, managing director of Norcott Technologies.