Raspberry Pi number 1 was in the 10th slot for auction with number 10 going first for the relative bargain price of £1,900. Number 7 bought by an anonymous benefactor for £989 has donated to the Computer Museum at the Centre for Computing History in Suffolk.

The enthusiasm for the project is boundless, but the history of its manufacture as recorded on it's Blog is really ominously worrying for the UK's potential as an innovative, resourceful manufacturing environment.  (Below: Eben Upton with Raspberry Pi. Courtesy:http://www.rca46la45rq.info/74/why-do-children-it-training/)

"Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to manage manufacture in quite the way we’d hoped. As you will know if you’ve been reading the forums and the articles on this website, the Raspberry Pi Foundation had intended to get all its manufacture done in the UK; after all, we’re a UK charity, we want to help bootstrap the UK electronics industry, and doing our manufacturing in the UK seemed another way to help reach our goals.

"We investigated a number of possible UK manufacturers, but encountered a few problems, some of which made matters impossible.

Turnaround and pricing issues
"Firstly, the schedule for manufacture for every UK business we approached was between 12-14 weeks (compared to a 3-4 week Far East turnaround). 

"Secondly, we found that pricing in the UK varied enormously with factories’ capacity. If a factory had sufficient capacity to do the work for us, they were typically quoting very high prices; we’d expected a delta between manufacture pricing between the UK and the Far East, but these build prices not only wiped out all our margin, but actually pushed us into the red.

"Some factories were able to offer us prices which were marginally profitable, but they were only able to produce at most a few hundred units a month; and even then, we were doing better by more than five dollars per unit if we moved that manufacture to the Far East.

"When you’re talking about tens of thousands of units per batch, losing that sum of money for the charity – a sum that we can spend on more manufacture, more outreach work and more R&D – just to be able to say we’d kept all the work in one country, starts to look irresponsible.

Taxed to manufacture: free to import
"One cost in particular that really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax.

"If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all!

"This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. 

Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things, and it’s an issue we’ve taken up with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

"The pragmatic decision has been to look to Taiwan and China for manufacturing, at least for the first batch. We are still working on investigating UK possibilities; currently an option which would mean that all Model A (demand we expect to be much lower than that of Model B) will be built in the UK, and at the moment that’s looking do-able, although it’s not as efficient economically as doing it in Asia.
 

Six limited edition board for auction
"There are still six of the very limited edition of beta boards, the first Raspberry Pi ever made, left to go in our charity auction. All proceeds from the auction will go to fund the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s charitable work. We are amazed at the generosity people have been showing so far; thank you and good luck to everybody who has been bidding.