Title says most of it. Spin electric scooters exited the Seattle market and abandoned their scooters all over the city and apparently they have a pi 4 in them!
Wait, a company can just decide to abandon hundreds of their hardware in the middle the streets?
Privatized profits, socialized loses.
Corporations be like:
🐰
👉👉
Companies can just dump shit wherever when they’re done with it and have no responsibility to clean it up?
🌎👨🚀🔫👩🚀
Oh so that’s why you can’t buy them anymore, people are using them as microcontrollers.
Pis are pretty commonly used in industrial automation use cases (production lines, robot arms, etc) too. They’re not the best thing for those use cases, but they’re far cheaper than anything else, and anyone with basic programming knowledge can get something running on them, rather than having to find someone experienced with embedded systems (usually in C or C++).
When there were major supply chain issues, a lot of the limited supply was going towards those use cases, as the companies using them had already placed large orders very far in advance.
It wasn’t just that they placed orders in advance. The pi foundation literally told people it was prioritizing those customers over anyone else. Kinda shitty IMO, considering the reason the pi was built in the first place.
I’m not well versed on the details surrounding this, but it sounds like Pi pivoted to supply businesses during the chip shortage, instead of direct to consumer in the more hobbyist space.
That seems like a win win, well within moral business practice.
Yes, Pi was founded (afaik) as a cheap minimalist PC. No thrills or bullshit, with a strong moral stance on making a barebones PC available to all.
Pivoting to help keep a global chip shortage from causing a global collapse of anything needing simple circuit boards isn’t evil. It’s helping everyone get through potentially a lot worse than not having access to a mostly hobbyist device. And it probably meant they could use their own impacted supply line in the most efficient way possible.
Hopefully the consumer Pi isn’t lost for good, but this seems far from corporate greed, but a necessary concession during a global disaster.
“When there were”, implying you can find a pi4 in stock right now that isn’t from a scalper
So that’s where all the damn Pi4s went.
Well, they sure as fuck didn’t go to the hobbyist market, we’ve been getting fucked by the rPi foundation for 3 years now.
Can you just take apart abandoned things for parts in the states? Probably just have to be a white male and no problems?
Probably, who is gonna come after you? The company has decided it is too expensive to repossess them.
