CAMBRIDGE, UK -- The Raspberry Pi Foundation has begun manufacturing the first units of its $35 PC.

The first batch of 10,000 is expected to be available by the end of January.

The foundation originally intended to have all manufacturing conducted in the UK, but encountered scheduling and capacity issues.

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into a TV and a keyboard and can handle spreadsheets, word-processing, games, and video. It's aimed at children in poor nations.

Lead-times for UK manufacturers were 12 to 14 weeks, the organization said, verus 3 to 4 weeks for Southeast Asian producers. Furthermore, those UK businesses with the capacity to handle the order quoted "very high prices," which would have "wiped out" the foundation's margin.

Even the most cost-competitive UK manufacturers were some $5 dollars per unit higher than the Asian producers.

Also, building the Raspberry Pi in Britain would have incurred higher taxes. "If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and 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," a Raspberry Pi volunteer wrote on the company's website.

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