That's from April, but in short there's a huge order backlog that they're still working through apparently, despite producing half a million units per month. With the lockdown gap in production and the Pi 4s getting increasingly integrated into various 3rd party products I suppose that's no surprise.
It's quite apparent that there's little demand for the Pico, since it's always in stock.
> It's quite apparent that there's little demand for the Pico, since it's always in stock.
Without additional context (which perhaps you have and used subconsciously) that's not evidence that there's less demand - just evidence that the ratio of demand to stock is lowest. It could be that it has 2x the demand but they prioritised it and produced 3x as much stock, or it could be that a specific component makes one product easier/less delayed than the other to make (in which case equal demand could still lead to only one being regularly in stock).
If for example 100 people a year want to buy a product $A, and 10 a year want to buy product $B, and the company manufactures 200 $A's a year but only 5 $B's, then $B will be out of stock more despite being far less popular.
Or course this partly relates to how well a company predicts future demand when deciding how much of each product to create. But in many cases (though I would guess not when it comes to The Raspberry Pi Foundation) marketing therefore also becomes a factor - in that companies may see value in either creating slightly less than they expect there to be demand for, or artificially limiting / lying about stock levels, in order to get people thinking "wow it's out of stock so it must be popular!"
Well it's either an overestimation in production or an underestimation in demand. Or likely both to some extent in this case.
I bought a few of them a while back and have only recently managed to integrate one of them into a really basic project. They tried to make some kind of middle ground between an ESP and an Arduino, while providing an incredibly buggy MicroPython build and no Arudino IDE integration. Some of that's been corrected, but it still remains this all rounder thing that's never the best choice for the application.
> Well it's either an overestimation in production or an underestimation in demand.
Or they correctly estimated, planned not to go out of stock
and were able to succeed. Jumping from "it never shows as out of stock" to "therefore they must have badly estimated one or both of supply or demand" is even stranger a leap of thinking than the initial misconception of thinking that not going out of stock proves low demand.
In both this comment and the previous one, you're guessing at a possible explanation while writing as if you know it to be the correct explanation.
(Sorry for coming across all critical, hopefully learning what can and can't be construed from a product being in stock is worth my negativity!)
That's from April, but in short there's a huge order backlog that they're still working through apparently, despite producing half a million units per month. With the lockdown gap in production and the Pi 4s getting increasingly integrated into various 3rd party products I suppose that's no surprise.
It's quite apparent that there's little demand for the Pico, since it's always in stock.