[irjustin]

> Whatever quantity Vodafone is buying is DEFINITELY more than any hobbyist is able to pay.

You're arguing for the parent comment with this.

The "foundation" was intentioned as for hobbyists and people who wanted to learn while being affordable that's how it was sold to the general public. Chasing a higher payer will always lock out "affordable".

An analogy would be healthcare. Capitalism and affordable+for-many are at direct odds.

[cushychicken]

> Chasing a higher payer will always lock out "affordable".

This reveals a misunderstanding of the economics of both chipset vendors and electronics manufacturing.

The more Pis that the foundation can make at one time, the cheaper their unit costs can be, by encouraging competition from suppliers and getting price breaks from chipset vendors.

Large customers like Vodafone buying 10k or 100k is a huge advancement towards that goal.

In the short term? Yeah, maybe some shortages of SBCs.

In the long term, they’ll probably be able to build more Pis at higher quantities and cheaper unit prices.

[irjustin]

> In the long term, they’ll probably be able to build more Pis at higher quantities and cheaper unit prices.

My retort is - then you misunderstand the gap between Android and iPhone. MediaTek+Qualcomm vs Apple [0]

It's too simplistic to think just because you produce more you'll make more money. There's an absolute maximum in the pricing-volume curves. Even if you have to pay more for the chips, if you can simply charge more you'll make money hand over fist. That's what this thread is saying that the RPi foundation "sold out".

The last sentence is incredibly hard to achieve, but if your brand is a household name like iPhone or R.Pi then you can start jacking up the price and as long as you have correctly identified the price insensitive (or less sensitive anyway) you price to the max of the particular group.

[0] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-ap-ma...

[cushychicken]

Not every brand makes the decision to raise prices in the face of lowering backend costs, however.

I don't have enough info on historical pricing of RPis to say, but it certainly seems to benefit their stated mission of education (and unstated one of industrial SBC supplier) to have lower per-unit pricing at retail or wholesale.

Though I get the feeling I may be arguing in the face of a bunch of folks who just want to mob the Foundation for taking a course they don't personally agree with.

[WithinReason]

Many capitalist countries have affordable healthcare.