Pi Zero

[Masato]

Just wondering if anyone has contacted any of the Alibaba sellers that advertise having Pi Zeros in stock? I've had decent success ordering from Aliexpress, but never tried directly from Alibaba, so maybe someone here has some feedback.

[Misel]

Considering that the Pi Zero is manufactured in the UK I doubt that Alibaba have them in stock - unless they're selling replicas.

Contrary to all other PIs the production of the Zero was not financially backed by RS Components and Element 14. Instead the Raspberry Pi paid for the whole production upfront.

The first batch were 100,000 units where many were reserved for the PiMag and the rest sold out very quickly. The demand was much higher than anticipated and now that the initial sales of the PI3 has slowed down a bit another batch of 100,000 zeroes is being manufactured, with more batches planned.

So as far as I know everbody will get Pi zero at a decent price. It's just a matter of time.

Disclaimer: All this information I got from lurching on the net (ie. Twitter, Raspberrypi.org..) and the PiMag.

[crispy_tofu]

Be wary of sellers selling Pi Zeros on Alibaba - the only way they probably could have sourced these units is by buying them from distributors. And then again, they're probably going to want a neat profit margin for it.