>2. Raspberry Pi Trading do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront. So supply will always be limited for devices like the Zero, while demand is high. [emphasis added]

This is not true. If it were true, they would welcome a mass payment up-front as this would solve their "do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront" issues which you cite. Instead, I was banned from their forum (forever) despite being a contributor in good standing, for wanting to arrange such an up-front payment with others who were interested, even though I already removed any Raspberry Pi branding from my bid (i.e. the bid would be in generic terms), meaning they would be free to consider the bid but do not have to accept, and even though I greatly limited discussion to just a few posts in their off-topic forum and was clear that they did not officially sanction such a bid from us. (My bid also would have been for lower specifications and a higher per-unit price than the official raspberry pi zero specifications and price, to further make fulfilling it easy.) Their official reason was that I was generating too much mod mail for them to deal with (even though throughout the site they encourage people to message the mods about anything and everything), since hundreds of people were extremely interested in ordering mass quantities. I feel I went out of my way to be extremely fair and transparent, did not make any sort of misrepresentations, or imply they supported me, etc. I went out of my way not to talk in terms of their competitors as well but to support Raspberry Pi in every way possible.

So there is huge demand, but, no, capital constraints are not the reason that the Raspberry Pi Trading foundation does not wish to make x million raspberry pi zero type devices upfront - even if it would further their cause.

I don't have additional visibility than the above and have shared what I know.

Capital is more than just cash. There is land, buildings, and equipment. I honestly don't know any details about the group's situation, but I am put in mind of a story: doubling the order cost four times the price for the simple reason that the supplier could handle the smaller order with the existing factory. In order to meet the larger order, however, he would need to build a new factory.

The natural word for that is "capacity" rather than "capital".

For what's it's worth we targeted between 1 and 10 million units as a one-time bid (without them having to continue to guarantee availability ), and also targeted a ridiculously long fulfillment period, like a year - which would be enough to build any capacity they want, to fulfill that one bid. With the understanding that in the meantime (while the bidders' wait the year or however long) a newer version could be announced, no harm no foul and the bidders would not get that, and also that this is a way for the bidders to support the foundation, without getting support (such as supplier support) in return.

Finally, we thought that Broadcom might not want to flood the market with cheap chips, so we positioned it as a genuine set of orders around 1000 pieces, by entrepreneurs. (For real.) This would then lock these small-time entrepreneurs in with the Broadcom family (there are other ARM suppliers), and Broadcom could therefore upsell them on the rest of their full production solutions, since the small sellers would not have unlimited access to more chips and if their small marketing takes off they will want to place large orders for chips that are actually available, on their custom PCB.

At any rate, whatever the issue was, it wasn't capital.

I suspect the reason is quite obvious. They are losing money on every unit produced.

This is a "loss leader" strategy to get devs committed to the Broadcom platform only to find out "actually $5 computers don't exist, they are really $35".

Go to Mouser / DigiKey and put in the part number for the Broadcom chip, choose a very high number as quantity - look at that price.

Further contact a PCB and Assembly outfit and get a quote from them for a small board with a 100 or so SMD placements. You will see that $5 is complete fantasy.

RPI Foundation could've just marketed this as "cheap development platforms for you to try out your code, but only 1 per customer". Instead they've tried to maintain that this is some sort of "real product" that is commercially available at otherworldly low prices.

I'm a bit confused as to what happened here, were you trying to conduct a multi-million dollar deal through their community forums?

> My bid also would have been for lower specifications and a higher per-unit price than the official raspberry pi zero specifications and price, to further make fulfilling it easy.

Higher or lower, different specifications would have meant a lot of overhead in designing, testing and certifying a new design.

> Their official reason was that I was generating too much mod mail for them to deal with (even though throughout the site they encourage people to message the mods about anything and everything), since hundreds of people were extremely interested in ordering mass quantities.

Were you trying to corral hundreds of people into making a single bulk order of a new pi, but without the pi branding? That sounds like an enormous headache with regards to delivery, liability, etc. Also you say hundreds, hundreds of people buying need to be purchasing tens of thousands each before you're talking about x million devices. Were the hundreds of people all realistic purchasers with $100-200k ready to put down in advance?

> This is not true. If it were true, they would welcome a mass payment up-front as this would solve their "do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront" issues which you cite.

That would be just pre-ordering, which has other costs to a community. Letting the first people buy 10 for various hobbies probably doesn't help the community as getting the new device into 10x as many hands.