Maplin Resurrection?

[Peter Parry]

Electronics Weekly has a report of the re launch of Maplin Electronics

as an on-line retailer

[Steve Walker]

They'll have to make a good job of it and keep the prices down too. When Maplin had become far more expensive than RS and never had more than a few of each item in stock, it had clearly lost its way.

Mail order it would have to compete with RS, Farnell (plus their CPC arm), Jaycar, Amazon and Ebay - and, for me at least, RS and CPC have the advantage of trade counters for urgent purchases and Amazon has very quick deliveries.

SteveW

[Adam Funk]

Also Pimoroni for fun stuff & kits, & AliExpress for cheap but not at all urgent components.

[alan_m]

Just another start up company using an established name. It's just another example of badge branding.

Possibly a name firmly associated with expensive toys for boys that no-one purchased rather than ethos of original company when they first started. Some of the comments about the article suggest that they are not competitive on price for items that can can be obtained easily elsewhere.

[Brian Reay]

It is a competitive market. Besides there being no shortage of suppliers of genuine arduino products and numerous r pi (re)sellers, the Chinese turn out arduino copies/clones by the container load.

Maplin were never cheap, they were sometimes useful if you needed the odd part quickly etc but even that became questionable in later years as local stores seemed to stock fewer and fewer components.

While I don't wish them ill, I do wonder if this will last.

[charles]

you've missed Rapid Electronics, the only one to be able to produce a fuse holder for fuses about ¼inch* in diameter. RS had spare fuses, but no holders.

*I can't be bothered to find the relevant bit of kit to check on the exact size.

The original Maplin was basically by post, but thre was a shop in Southend.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Rapid electronics

[The Natural Philosopher]

Its hard to know what in fact one can do these days without a reflow soldering station, and access to pcb manufacturing stuff. Everything is surface mount by and large and many modules are cheaper to buy than to make.

Most people who might have been soldering transistors in the 60s are programming raspberry pis...

[Bob Eager]

CPC trade counter currently closed.

In a small way (but fast delivery) look at Cool Components.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Seems odd to me to use the name of a company that in the last half of its life, totally lost direction. And those who do remember it as a once half decent company, perhaps no longer customers for this sort of thing?

[Adam Funk]

Interesting -- thanks for the tip. (I see they also sell lab glassware & a bunch of other non-electronic stuff.)

[tim...]

I wonder if this will be as successful as the Woolworths online reincarnation?

tim

[T i m]

It could be slightly reminiscent of the good ole days where I remember wandering round the local (ours was not-so-local) Computer shop, looking at all the very expensive gear on offer from the likes of BBC, Tandy, Commodore, Sinclair and Atari.

Floppy drives, RAM packs, Sideways boards and the like. ;-)

Being a keen user of the RPi (I think I have at least one of each model) and Arduino / ESP32's it might be handy for those not yet so equipped to go, see and buy.

I have a Maplin RPi starter kit (with keyboard, mouse, RPi, PSU and SD card etc) that was given to me by a family member who was given it for Xmas but didn't really get into it. I sent some money back for the lad as I couldn't just take it. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[spuorgelgoog]

But they used to be reasonable, and reliable, and filled the gap between Radiospares (if you had an account) and Trustworthy Terry's Tested Transistors of Tooting.

Owain

[alan_m]

Not for the last 20 years!

[Chris Green]

Since one of the main points of Arduino is that the hardware design is open source there really isn't such a thing as 'genuine' Arduino.

[John Rumm]

and don't forget CAShTel :-)

[Bob Eager]

I used that a lot.

[Brian Reay]

You may care to watch the Julian Ilett video on YouTube where he discusses the various Arduino originals and clones.

The problem with the ?open source culture?, everyone forgets there is no such thing as a free lunch.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

The mistake Maplin made was to go onto the high street at a time when people like Tandy and other medium sized chains were pulling out. They knew the writing was on the wall as costs rose for having high street outlets. Brian