If you have been following the Raspberry Pi news in the last couple of years you will be aware of massive shortages in hardware for various reasons, one disgusting thing that I have noticed in this time is scalping.
scalping is the practice of using bots to bulk buy tickets from licensed sources and then sell them for a profit. The same applies to electronics and famously the Sony Playstation 5 and XBox suffered from this along with graphics card
Now we have electronics such as the Raspberry Pi suffering from disgusting greed – want to see what I mean, read on.
I’m not going to put a link to the Amazon listing – I don’t want anyone to visit this but here is the price at the time of writing
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (4GB) at £169.99 from Amazon.co.uk – no thats not a joke, a complete and utter ripoff and a disgrace that this is happening.
For context – these are the prices from Pihut in the UK an authorized dealer
| Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (1GB) | £40 |
| Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (2GB) | £52 |
| Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (4GB) | £62.50 |
| Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (8GB) | £85.50 |
Now the price on Amazon fluctuates but thats a markup of over £100. Thats a disgrace and much as it doesn’t surprise me, lets be honest Amazon isn’t going to do about it.
Incidentally Ebay – unsurprisingly was no better.
Options
Now, I would recommend you visit https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/?variant=raspberry-pi-4-model-b-8gb and look at the authorized dealers and then if they have an option to subscribe or be alerted if there is any stock.
For example Pimoroni recently got a batch of 2gb and 4gb and restricted these to 1 per customer, I got the alert and nabbed one of each.
Much as this is a Raspberry Pi site I would actually seriously consider whatever your use case is and perhaps select a different SBC, there are many options from Banana Pi, OrangePi, Mango Pi, Odroid and others.
It depends on your needs – you can easily use one of the SBCs above for a basic computer, retro gaming setup, plex server, nas and connecting electronic sensors. I think you should investigate these, you can easily get these board for similar prices
Now its easy for me to say that, I have the boards but it would nice to make the greedy sellers be left with stock they can’t sell – if they care
If you do see these listings – take note of the companies/people and never buy anything from them
