The Pi Zero—the new £4 ($5) Raspberry Pi—has sold out in under 24 hours. The Raspberry Pi Foundation says that around 20,000 individual Pi Zeroes have been sold in the last day, along with a further 10,000 copies of the MagPi magazine which had a Pi Zero on the front. "You'd think we'd be used to it by now, but we're always amazed by the level of interest in new Raspberry Pi products," said Eben Upton, the founder of the foundation.

"Right now it appears that we've sold every individual Zero we made... people are scouring the country for the last few Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury and Smiths branches that haven't sold out [of the MagPi magazine]," Upton told Wired.

Upton said they are producing more Zeroes "as fast as we can" at its factory in Pencoed, Wales, but didn't specify when more stock would be available.





Element14

Adafruit



In the meantime, if you want to get your hands on a Pi Zero, you have two relatively easy options: you can sign up for a six-month subscription to MagPi for £30/$70; or you can pay the bloodsuckers that are re-selling Pi Zeroes on Ebay. At the moment, copies of MagPi magazine #40 are listing for up to £99 on Ebay, and some auctions have already completed for £50. Upton told Wired that he would prefer people to wait for more stock, rather than "lining the pockets" of Ebay touts.

The Pi Zero, priced at just £4 (or $5), is essentially just a cheaper and smaller version of the Raspberry Pi 1 Model A+. It has the same Broadcom SoC (but the CPU is clocked at 1GHz rather than 700MHz) and lacks a 3.5mm audio jack, but is otherwise almost identical. The main difference, of course, is the price: the Pi Zero is about a third of the price of a Model A+.

As an interesting aside, I wonder whether the release of the Pi Zero—plus the seemingly massive level of interest—will affect the BBC Micro:bit. The BBC's education-oriented single-board computer (SBC) was meant to be distributed to a million kids in the UK this autumn but has now been delayed until next year due to a power supply issue. When it hits the market next year, there may already be a firmly entrenched cheap-and-cheerful SBC.