| We're still in the toilet-paper-hoarding stage. Also people are still reselling at 400% to 1000% markup. Probably at least a couple years. Imagine if a shipment of 100K Raspberry Pi 2 W Zero came in today. "Everybody knows" if you buy direct you can pay $5, and the lowest price for scalpers on Amazon for a 2 W Zero is currently $149 so you can probably actually sell for $130-ish and clear $125 of scalping profit per unit shipped. Note there's not much risk... Put $500 of Pi on the credit card, get 100 units, if you can scalp FOUR at hyperinflated prices you broke even, even if the price craters to $5 tomorrow and you're sitting on 96 unsold units. There's just too much money floating around for the shortage to go away. The only way for a manufacturer to crack the scalper market is to get financing so cheap they can out-finance the entire scalper "industry". But no cross-planet exporter can out-finance the consumer sector credit card printing press of cash, so the scalpers are semi-permanent and some technologies are essentially dead now. Now personally I've written off the Pi and STM32 ecosystems. Everything in resale is either fake or falsely marked ("8GB" but its actually 2G, etc) or marked up to insane prices so those technologies are dead to me. Unfortunately there's still people trying to use those legacy technologies so prices on Amazon are $149 for a $5 product, but eventually those techs will be widely regarded as dead and then the market can clear and go back to normal. Overall I'm "enjoying" ESP32 products, at least those can still be purchased at a reasonable price... |