Online Retailers Delaying Sales Of Raspberry Pi 4 Model Until 2023, Thanks To A Few Good Chips Getting Scarce

Online retailers may not be able to send you a specific Raspberry Pi 4B model even for next year's Christmas.

Mouser is providing an estimated ship date for a Raspberry Pi 4B model with 4GB RAM of January 25, 2023. Digi-Key is also indicating that it will ship the same model now only in 2023.

Raspberry Pis are great stocking suffers for my tech-crazy family, but this year turned out to be a challenge. Raspberry Pi for the first time increased the prices of its boards in October due to the higher cost of shortage-constrained components.

We have reached out to the board biz for comment, and will update the story when we hear back.

The inability to fulfill orders led Raspberry Pi to cap production of single-computer boards to seven million units in 2021.

"We’re now expecting our supply chain challenges to continue through much of 2022. These challenges will fall most heavily on our older products, built on 40nm silicon: in practice, anything that isn’t a Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 400, or Compute Module 4," said Eben Upton, said in an October blog entry.

But the supply chain challenges have also worsened for Raspberry Pi 4 models in the last month, with online retailers delaying shipment dates even further.

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Official Raspberry Pi distributors, including Adafruit, are out of stock. Okdo, an official Raspberry Pi distributor, has pulled the Raspberry Pi 4 model with 4GB of RAM from its website. Only a 2GB Raspberry Pi 4B model is available on PiShop.us.

The limited supply of Raspberry Pi 4B with 4GB of RAM seems to be heading to Sparkfun with 1,140 units incoming, with "some are estimated to be available by Jan 2, 2022," according to its site.

The heavy demand for chips has led to semiconductor manufacturers prioritizing larger customers. Car makers and tech companies like Apple and Intel are buying up chip manufacturing capacity from the likes of TSMC in anticipation of shortages through 2022. ®