So Wednesday morning I set an alarm for 5:45am, which if you know me at all is basically a war crime, because the Raspberry Pi Model B finally went on sale and I was NOT going to miss it. Spoiler: I missed it.
For anyone who hasn't been following this (and I know a chunk of you havent, because two people emailed me last week asking why I kept tweeting about "a $25 computer" like it was a typo) - the Raspberry Pi is this credit-card-sized board out of the UK, built by a nonprofit foundation that wanted to get cheap, hackable computers back into the hands of kids the way BBC Micros did in the 80s. Two versions: a $25 Model A and a $35 Model B with an extra USB port and an Ethernet jack. No case. No keyboard. You bring your own SD card, your own monitor, your own everything. It runs Linux. It has an ARM chip and 256MB of RAM, which sounds like nothing until you remember thats roughly what a lot of us were running full desktop environments on ten-ish years ago.
Sale went live at 6am GMT (that's 1am here, but I'm on the east coast and apparently my brain decided 5:45 was close enough, which tells you how well I did the timezone math half-asleep). Two retailers had it, RS Components and a place called Premier Farnell/element14. I had both tabs open. I had the "buy" button practically memorized from staring at product pages all week.
Both sites fell over within minutes. Not "slow," not "queued" - actually down. I got a database error from one of them that I am fairly sure was not meant for customers to see. Reloaded probably sixty times over the next forty minutes, watched Twitter fill up with people in the exact same boat, and eventually gave up and made coffee like a normal person accepting defeat. The initial batch was apparently only around 10,000 units total between both distributors, which for a $35 gadget that people all over the world had been anticipating for months is just not going to cut it. Not even close.
Heres the thing that actually gets me about this though, and its not the part everyone's writing about. Its not the sellout, it's not the crashed servers, it's that a nonprofit with basically no marketing budget managed to generate more genuine first-day demand than plenty of venture-funded gadgets Ive watched launch with a full PR rollout behind them. Nobody ran ads for this thing. It spread because actual programmers and actual hobbyists wanted it, and told other programmers and hobbyists, who told more people. Thats a different kind of hype than what we usually get shoved in our faces, and I dont think it's an accident that it happened to the one device explicitly built for kids and tinkerers instead of for a keynote stage.
I'll be honest, part of my morning frustration was just impatience - I already have three different ideas for what Id do with one (a little media box hooked to the TV downstairs is the boring one, a weather-station-slash-clock thing is the one Id actually finish) and now I get to sit here for who knows how long waiting on restock news. Foundation folks said more units are coming, and that eventually theyd like to get production up to tens of thousands a month, but "eventually" doesnt help me build anything this weekend.
Small tangent because I cant help myself: I keep seeing comparisons to the old $99 netbooks from a few years back and I think thats the wrong comparison entirely. Netbooks were trying to be a cheap laptop. The Pi isnt trying to be a cheap anything-you-already-own, its trying to be a $35 blank slate, which is a much weirder and more interesting goal, and probably why it appeals to a totally different crowd than the netbook people were chasing.
Anyway. If you managed to actually get your order through Wednesday morning, I am extremely jealous and also would like to hear what you're building with it, because between the SD card slot and that GPIO header there's clearly more here than "cheap desktop replacement." Leave a comment or just email me. I'll be here, refreshing the restock page.