Ordering these things - or, at least, trying to - is beyond ridiculous now. I've been checking three or four sites every month or so for literal years now to no avail.
I've even tried shimmying in an order with an 'educational supplier' here in the UK who apparently have 'some', but only for schools, so they won't let me have one, despite how much material I buy from them each month for my non-educational purposes. I don't blame them, of course, but I do find it weird how there's apparently a heckload of demand and no uptick in production.
I was able to get one last summer. Since then it has been even easier to get, albeit this was from Germany and it was not marked up in price but from a standard electronics retailer
Someone eventually manages to buy a RPi, but you were that lucky one as the RPis are still almost unobtanium almost everywhere. However, a RPi is just the most famous and heavily advertised one among the many Linux capable embedded boards out there, therefore pretty much every project using one can be converted to a similar board from another vendor.
The Pi4 has been hard to come by, getting later. But 15 years ago there was _NOTHING_ like that. Now you can get Pis and all their clones, the odroid boards, bananas, all sorts
I've even tried shimmying in an order with an 'educational supplier' here in the UK who apparently have 'some', but only for schools, so they won't let me have one, despite how much material I buy from them each month for my non-educational purposes. I don't blame them, of course, but I do find it weird how there's apparently a heckload of demand and no uptick in production.