The world has been waiting to get them and on Wednesday at least one outlet totally sold out of its allotment of units. We are speaking, of course, of the $35 version of the Raspberry Pi PC. The tiny and cheap device, which went into production several weeks ago, finally went on sale on Wednesday.
The official Raspberry Pi web site announced that while the first PC units have yet to arrive from their Chinese based factories, the organization has now signed up two UK-based companies, RS Components and Premier Farnell, who will henceforth be manufacturing the PCs, as well as being in charge of the distribution of the first Chinese made units.
The blog post stated:
The involvement of RS Components and Premier Farnell means that we can build volume much, much faster than would have been possible on our own. We are no longer limited to batches of only 10k Raspberry Pis; the Raspberry Pi will now be being built to match demand.
Even though the first sales of the PCs were limited to one per customer, that didn"t stop Premier Farnell from selling out of its first batch of the $35 Raspberry Pi devices on Wednesday. RS Components are not yet taking pre-orders but are signing up people to be alerted when their first units are available to go on sale.
Meanwhile the $25 version of the Raspberry Pi PC is being put into production "immediately", according to the company. One bit of good news is that the $25 version will now get 256MB of RAM, which is double what was originally announced.
Image via Raspberry Pi Foundation