At 1:00 AM eastern time, Raspberry Pi updated their website offering information on how to purchase their highly anticipated, low-cost mini computer. To be able to sell in greater numbers the Raspberry Pi foundation has partnered with two UK sites - RS Components and Premier Farnell.
The involvement of RS Components and Premier Farnell means that we can build volume much, much faster than would have been possible on our own. We are no longer limited to batches of only 10k Raspberry Pis; the Raspberry Pi will now be being built to match demand.
Even though both of the sites were warned that this launch would generate an immense amount of traffic - both of them crashed immediately. Even worse, for those of us in North American there seems to no mention of how we can purchase it. When users were able to reach the site they were only shown a page where you could sign up to "show their interest in buying the product. Obviously, these sites were not ready to begin selling the product - hardware-wise or website-wise. As I tweeted:
In slightly happier news, the Raspberry Pi main website managed to stay up by switching to a static page (as seen in the screenshot up top). They also announced that the cheaper Model A - to be released at a later time - will have double the RAM as initially thought, from 128MB of RAM to 256MB.
Update: From @Grumpyoldgit99 on Twitter: "Spoken to RS sales team. Not on sale until end of week."
