Some unfortunate components to lose in shipping

[GianS]

I stumbled upon this 50 piece Gel-pak of HMC-ALH369 in a local returns store in Italy. The place is filled with cheap Amazon, Shein and AliExpress returns, so a sealed ESD bag with an Analog Devices logo caught my eye.
​It looks like they currently are on request but this has a 2021 date code so it also happened during the peak of the chip shortages. Even with +3k$ loss covered with shipping insurance the lead time on re-order surely made someone go crazy (if it was on request even then)

[amyk]

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/analog-devices-inc/HMC-ALH369-SX/4824061

Very specialist part, but that probably also means it was ordered by a company, and $10k is really not that much at the scales they operate at.

[tom66]

The chip shortage was so bad at one point to ship three boards we bought dev kits with specific microcontrollers on them and removed those to install on our boards.  Lead time for a certain PIC24 at the time was given as 18 months.  This was just for a demo system so we weren't super worried about traceability as it would be coming back home soon enough.

[Ranayna]

Did the shop know what they had? Or were you able to snag them for cheap?

[GianS]

They were in a giant chest with mostly trash and clothes where everything is 2€ because it isn't manually checked by the workers, but the lady got suspicious of why I took this and "priced" them by asking Gemini for a price with a photo and then putting a 10€ sticker on it. I took them regardless. I also took 50 ERM70321C44 CPLDs for 2€ in tube because I liked the tube. I keep returning to the store because when it opened I somehow found a Coros Apex 2 Pro also for 2€. Fully working, not even discharged completely.

[thm_w]

Interesting find.

You'd think AD would ship courier from USA, which means they can get it returned if it was unable to deliver, or if receiver didn't pay import duties. But I guess it can still get lost in the system.