this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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What do you think they should do? Manufacturing more won't help; bots will buy all available initial stock regardless. You can try using exclusive channels, but then you exclude a whole lot of people who will naturally get upset. Increasing the initial price will piss people off, too.
They're only valuable for scalpers because they're so hard to get. If they wouldn't constantly put business orders above consumer orders, the demand for scalping would evaporate just like it has for every other consumer electronic device. People aren't selling PS5s for $1000 anymore because you can just go buy one from the store.
How these bot networks work is they setup scripts to grab every available product they can. They don't care what it is; could be shoes, designer bag, GPU, whatever. They just pick something that has worked in the past.
RPis have worked in the past. Now, what they might see is that the new version doesn't move on eBay like the old ones did. The $500 RPi5 will sit untouched. If so, then the RPi5 will likely be the last time we see this kind of release behavior. But it won't happen this time, and there's little the RPi Foundation can do about it.
This is basically what happened in the GPU market this past generation. Scalpers bought up the first few weeks of stock for big flagship releases, but they sat there. Then they moved on, and the launch day availability was much better.