At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

It has nothing to do with "burning through the charitable donation money". The Pi is sold by a (profitable, AFAIK) wholly-owned subsidiary, the Raspberry Pi Trading Company. Manufacturing them does not absorb Foundation money at all.

They have been supply-constrained on components. It's that simple, surely. Eben Upton has said it again and again, and sometimes gone into detail about which components. They chose to try to keep the whole ecosystem alive, which meant prioritising commercial customers, they've been manufacturing millions of devices per year, and it still isn't enough to meet demand.

FWIW, if I was in their shoes I would have discontinued the 4B series entirely, by early 2022. I personally think they should not be operating in that segment with an SBC. I think there should just be a Pi 400 that takes a CM4. Both to simplify things in the educational sector, and to get out of the "high end SBC I am not using that is in my desk drawer" segment entirely.

They should focus on the Pico, which is clearly now their most interesting product line and their most interesting educational device.

FWIW I think they really are. In the middle of last year they deliberately pivoted both MagPi and Hackspace Magazine to projects involving the Pico, and they've done, IMO, a very good job in demonstrating that many of the educational projects around the Pi Zero are little more than simple Python (usually) scripts that toggle a few GPIO pins. Not only do they run just fine on a Pico or Pico W, it's arguably of more obvious educational value to see them running on such simple devices.

One of the main options pointed at is low-power x86 boxes, which are better than Pis ever were. The rest of the ARM ecosystem is, I agree, poor.

> - people (often Americans) saying that the Pi has been "supply-constrained for five years". It really hasn't; it wasn't particularly supply-constrained in the UK until about five or six months into the pandemic.

Then it really has; there being a supply in the UK isn't exactly useful to most of the world.

> What I don't understand is this: how is it, if you've not been able to get hold of something for _five_ years, there's been no obvious co-ordinated attempts to get mainline support for the alternatives, or even any attempt to match the documentation? Five years was plenty of time to pick a single series of devices and match the same level of kernel support, surely? Couldn't it have been crowdfunded?

Partially, nobody was expecting it to actually take that long. If at the start of the shortage we'd known it was going to be 5 years, there probably would have been more of a push. OTOH some of the alternatives have been getting more polished.

> It's almost as if most of the people whining are just upset there isn't a cheap device they can drop into a Kodi box without any effort.

Okay. Yes? That's a valid usecase.

Put all the high-performance work into the CM units of different specifications. Make (or encourage the market to continue to make) mainboards that take those units. Maybe certify a couple of them for the Foundation's use.

And then focus on making microcontroller-level chips at different performance levels, up to an "alternative home computer" device. Something small, which can be learned completely. Enough power for something equivalent to a Minix or a CP/M or RISC OS. The RP2040 is almost there anyway.