The Raspberry Pi Foundation reports that it's experiencing a mild manufacturing "hiccup" causing a delay in shipping the first batch of boards.
The setback is due to an accidental substitution of an Ethernet jack in the factory. More specifically, the team calls for jacks with integrated magnetics in the schematics (which provides DC isolation and filters out noise), but instead the factory soldered in non-magnetic jacks. That means the incorrect Ethernet jacks have to be ripped out and replaced with the correct jack before the boards are sent out to users.
"We’ve known about this for four days now, but we haven’t been able to tell you about it because it meant we had to do some further tests to make sure that nothing else was affected," the Raspberry Pi blog states. "Happily, it’s a very minor problem to fix (desolder the dud jack/solder on a new one), and the factory is nearly done working on replacing them on the first set of boards."
While the team is pushing the first batch out now, later batches may see a slight delay. The Ethernet jacks they had in stock are now considered faulty, so the team has to hunt down and order a large quantity of the "correct" Ethernet jacks as quickly as possible. Element 14/Premier Farnell and RS Components are reportedly working hard to help the team gather the correct components and get the Raspberry Pi boards out fast.
"We are very, very sorry," the team writes. "We know you want your Raspberry Pi as soon as possible (and many of you are being inhumanly patient, having followed us since we launched this website eight months ago). We’ll keep you updated with how manufacture is moving."
The $35 Raspberry Pi "Model B" is board of choice to ship out to consumers first. It contains two USB ports, 256 MB of RAM, an Ethernet port and a 700 MHz Broadcom BCM2835 SoC. The Videocore 4 GPU within the SoC is roughly the equivalent to the original Xbox's level of performance, providing Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode.
