A sizable percentage of all of the Pi devices made likely are sitting unused in boxes in closets around the world. The resale value isn't high enough to motivate many people to go find them and sell them to those who would put them into productive use.
I managed to get one from Adafruit last week. They restock ~weekly, typically Wednesdays, and sell out within a few minutes of the notification going out.
The official suppliers are required to sell at MSRP. People buy and then resell at higher prices so you can usually find them on amazon and eBay for double or more the MSRP.
Yeah and even an outdated atom box with a decent SSD way outperforms a pi when running something like Home Assistant. While using about the same power (5W or so).
It's a much better option if you don't need the GPIOs that the pi offers (I do so I do use one, but with an SSD over USB)
Take a look at https://mrchromebox.tech, particularly the "Supported Devices" page for models that can be upgraded to a firmware allowing the install of other OSes. Chromeboxes and Chromebooks by default prevent the user from installing and running anything except ChromeOS, which is a lot less powerful than Linux and others, but thankfully that limitation can be worked around. I've repurposed a good number of them, mainly Asus and HP ones, by following the instructions at that site, and never encountered any problems.
I also have all my Raspberries collecting dust after I swapped the last working one running Kodi with a Asus CN62 Chromebox: the performance difference is huge.
It depends also on whether you need a real name brand Raspberry Pi or whether you can use any equivalent computer. For instance, pine64 makes significantly nicer hardware in the same price range and is actually in stock.
