Anybody have any luck buying microcomputers (raspberry pis, jetson nanos, etc) recently? The market is absolutely fucking crazy. Either sold out of marked up ~200%

Supply chain issues, unless you absolutely need them now just wait a bit.

The global trade war intensified recently. Supply chain issues are to be expected.

@Oktokolo The what?isn't the chip shortage a result of economic growth that the chip manufacturers can't keep up with?

@lbfalvy Yeah, sure, increased fear of what or whom the US sanctions next certainly has nothing to do with the hoarding that is going on everywhere...

@Oktokolo Is there any substantial hoarding? How come I didn't hear of this? I thought the additional demand is all going into production.

We cant buy anything as company too. It is fucked up…

@lbfalvy Imagine, you are buying stuff you need a steady supply of because the company uses it to make its products. Would you in times of global economic warfare be more likely to go for a just-in-time strategy - or would you prefer aquiring a little stockpile that lasts a year, so you don't have to close your business in case of a global shortage.

And if you would be Winnie-the-Pooh of China, would you prefer to run out of chips in the instant the US decides to sanction you even more or would you try to get as much supply in advance as possible to buy more time for getting self-sufficient.

I believe, that the core cause for the supply shortage is the increased fear in the market. Companies and countries are stockpiling stuff because it may become unavailable soon. Until the stockpiles are full or production increased way out of proportion, we will see an odd shortage of supply that really doesn't look like it is backed by economic growth... And the pandemics don't help either.

@Oktokolo That's a really interesting theory and it sounds reasonable but we fundamentally don't understand the situation of world leaders, storage is very expensive and there's no factual evidence for stockpiling (unless you have any) so Occam's razor dictates to blame it all on simple provable causes such as increase in demand and the pandemic.

@lbfalvy Occam's Razor would dictate to blame the pandemic as it is the only definitely proven factor and a single factor always is more simple than any combination of factors.

@lbfalvy it's not gonna get better

@lbfalvy i read the rest of your exchange here.

... i would love to have your level of naivity. the world must be such a beautiful place with it.

There aren't many semiconductor plants in the world. When one closes, reduces production, or retools their machinery to produce different kinds of chips, it can have a huge and long-term effect on supply. The pandemic definitely caused demand to change drastically, and manufacturers struggled to keep up, but there are plenty of other contributing factors.

Believe it or not, bad weather and natural disasters worsened the shortage too. A factory in Japan was severely damaged by fire, the disastrous winter storm in Texas last year forced another factory to close, and Taiwan is having some climate-related issues too.

Companies are starting to build more factories around the world but that's a long term solution that will take years to come to fruition. We're likely to see this shortage continue all the way into 2024.

No issues with espruino products in my experience.

@Oktokolo OPEC States because of oil.

@lbfalvy all companies in the supply chain are actually hoarding them.

Every company now want the latest Chips for their AI. After all those years.

Instead of asking us, devs, to clean up the codebase ro run more efficient on older Hardware.