Rasperry Pi board easily cost hundreds of dollars, too, once the scalpers have bought up the little stock that is there.

I've only ever paid RRP and I strongly suggest you do to. Better yet, there are plenty of Pi 4 to purchase these days.

yes, these days. let's have a look at the last three years and see how it was then...

Why is that interesting? Are we expecting another global semiconductor supply chain problem?

Because people who _needed_ to buy a Raspberry Pi simply weren't able to do so.

Exactly the same as every other hardware supplier. For pi there was some kind of scheme for businesses who _actually_ needed the hardware in order to stay in business. No idea how that worked.

Either way, this is all history. Raspberry Pi boards do not cost hundreds of dollars as claimed.

psst https://rpilocator.com/

not much of use for the last three years.

This was used exactly for the last three years so you could get an alert when it became available.

Before that there was no need for a locator, just buy from whatever eshop, everyone had it in stock and at MSRP.

I am so grateful to the folks behind that site. It's the only reason I was able to track down units when I needed to buy them.

you not checking the site != people not being able to buy them

I'm not saying that it was easy, or anything like business as usual. They've done interviews where they talked about the difficult decision to prioritize companies that would go under without new stock over casual hobbyists. It's one of those unenviable situations where there's no good outcome, just a possibly less-bad one.

That site is one reason why I was able to buy Pis at list price these last three years.

Only if you are looking for a latest-gen or last gen machine. You can find some old NUCs for cheap, and there are lots of mini PCs or thin clients for around ~100. Yes about twice as expensive but more than twice as powerful (in both processor speed and features). Of course only if you plan to use it as a Linux computer, not for GPIO stuff.

This isn't super-practical for a commercial application which requires 70 identical machines.

Not only are they expensive and relatively large, machines that have had previous owners often have mystery issues which make them great for home tinkering projects, less so for something that can get you in trouble if it breaks down.

There's a reason companies buy new parts instead of employing teams to scour Craigslist for deals.

I hadn’t heard of these N100 systems before, but in a minute’s worth of searching I found this:

https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Intel-N100-Computer-Desktop-D...

Faster processor, 16GB RAM, 500GB NVME SSD, with case. $165! That’s damn impressive, considering the RPi5 with 8GB RAM is suggested to sell for $80 (good luck getting it for that little). And Amazon can get it to me in two days.

Yeah it’s definitely bigger, but I wasn’t expecting these systems to be so cheap.