...What are you complaining about, exactly?
I'm not complaining about anything.
Actually, you are complaining about multiple product variations. I just don't see your point supported in a useful way.
I'm making a point about having a base product and manufacturing a lot of slight variants and the problems that path can bring with it.
You have stated this, but it clearly does not apply when the product volume is sufficiently high enough. The production of rPi devices is definitely large enough that it causes no problem.
You can say they "make it work" but they had parts shortages, so in a real way they didn't make it work.
Sorry, that makes no sense. If they made one product, it would be a full up product with every option populated. That would be the most subject to shortages of any model and they would not be able to ship diddly.
Each one of those variants needs different parts.
Poorly stated. Each variation required a subset of the parts used on the full up version of the board.
That's more parts to stock (or be out of stock of).
No, it's the same set of parts they would stock for the full up board, but some boards can still be made when they are out of some parts.
They needed to stock 4 different RAM chips, and 3 different MMC chips.
Maybe I'm not up to speed on this. I thought we were talking about functions that were either on the board, or left off, like wifi.
Just the RAM and MMC makes 12 build variants with 7 different components right there. Anyone that has ever done purchasing knows buying and strategically stocking 2 critical parts is significantly easier than buying and stocking 7 critical parts.
Do they sell all these versions? Even if they do, I fail to see the problem. If you can't buy the parts, you can't build that variation. You can still build the variation that you can buy the parts for. Where is the problem?
Lets say the "No WIFI" and "No MMC" options are required for all the reasons you guys gave above. I don't have a problem with any of that. Based on the fact that people would still pay outrageous crazy inflated prices for these boards during the shortages means they could have easily had 1 option for RAM and 1 option for MMC (just using the biggest sizes for everything) and in a real way would have actually lowered their purchasing, production, and support costs by not having to deal with all those variants and critical components.
"Deal with"
I like that you turn them into something "difficult" by simply labeling them as "critical" components.
I would love to put some actual numbers to this stuff, but CM4 prices are all over the place right now and it looks like the RAM and MMC they used are still largely out of stock at distribution so their prices are all jacked up too.
Ok