$385 for a 16 GB Pi seems crazy.
Cheapest 16GB DDR5 stick I could go buy from the local computer parts store here in Finland is currently 363€, or $406.
I was going to buy my husband a second one for Christmas 😑
The price of a 3gb pi4 is insane.
The price increase itself is more than I paid for a new Pi4B a few years back. Amazing.
I found a $10 Pi4B at one of those overstock outlets. Keep an eye you there, it’s mostly junk but you can find that deals.
The aim of those buying up all the RAM is to prevent people owning devices capable of serious computing, so we have to rent what we used to have back from them, with added censorship and surveillance. Sam Altman has been explicit about how he wants no one to own RAM except companies running data centres. The Raspberry Pi becoming unfeasibly expensive is just an example of that forced transition from owning to renting playing out. When it was introduced the Pi cost $15. We’re in a different world now.
Yes but a pi zero 2w is $15 and is roughly equivalent to an OG B+. The problem as I see it is that computing segments like pis are jumping into the next segment up in power and in cost and nobody’s doing a very good job of marketing that or marketing the new product in the lower tier that are meant to actually replace them.
ESP32 started in the segment far below and moving up to match
When it was introduced the Pi cost $15
It was a 700MHz single core board with 512mb of ram…and it was $35, not $15
Just to be pedantic: mb would be millibits, or thousandths of a bit. MB is its big brother megabytes.
Fun fact: a kb is a thousand thousand times bigger than a mb!
Been there, and even have the shirt to prove it 😃
So do I!
And if tech had been proceeding since then as it did for the previous 30 years, you’d expect a whole lot more power for your $15 now.
An ESP32-P4 is about the same ram, better IO options, but half the CPU of the original Pi for about $20 right now. So the tech has been progressing a little bit.
ESP32-P4
Theres a ton of ebook readers that are using the esp32 as a baseline. and meshtastic. Its a fantastic set of chips and setup.
The original Pi had 512MB not KB. It ran Linux and had an SD card “disk”. The ESP32 series aren’t in the same class.
It was also $35 at release, not $15
You’re roughly getting 150x the power for 10x the cost with the current price hike.
You’re roughly getting 150x the power for 10x the cost with the current price hike.
Maybe in a vacuum, but in a world with millions or even billions of ‘legacy’ devices sitting around collecting dust that have equal or better compute power for less cost, these devices don’t really make sense.
No I completely agree, they make no sense these days. I was just saying that innovation has actually carried them forward and how much more power you actually get compared to the original raspis.
Exactly this ^^^. Pretty soon people will only own clients/terminals, we will rent CPU/RAM/GPU/Storage remotely: cloud computing for everyone. The most terrifying part of this is no one seems to care.
I expect us the tech literate / enthusiasts / professionals, advocating about this feel similarly to climate scientists. Screaming into the void as it all goes to shit.
To be fair I have heard this same pitch 4 different times since the 1980s and it hasn’t come to pass. We users just get around things by being clever and resourceful. Trust me when the big AI bubble either pops or deflates - they will be right back selling ram and drives for cheap. Someone will for sure make an adapter for all the extra data center ram or something.
Not everything is a conspiracy launched by shady billionaires in smoky back rooms. This is straightforward.
The AI companies are in competition so they’re building AI DCs at a breakneck pace in hopes of being the one who crawls out the blast crater when the bubble pops. This building mania predictably sent shock waves through RAM and other tech supply chains.
As to home compute, most people happily ditched their PCs a decade ago and do everything on their phone. I’m not sure tablets are popular anymore. Keep in mind, most consumers can’t pronounce Raspberry Pi and sure don’t want or need one. Ask the “man on the street” what he thinks of the RAM shortage and you’ll get a blank stare.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-hates-local-ai-models-computers
The RAM price jumps hurts smartphone prices too. Several models have basically no upgrades from the last year’s generation (see: Pixel) because of it.
They’re going to run into speed bumps soon enough. Capital problems are starting to appear in the AI market over the past month, that’s going to get a LOT worse. And no matter what, production in 5 years won’t look like it does today. Between competition, newer production tech, and political upheaval, it’s going to be a hell of a ride.
And then there’s nVidia, making DLSS5 that requires serious computing power while causing ram shortage.
Honest question, what are people using their 16GB RPis for? What are you running that needs that much RAM?
I installed SteamLink on it and use it to stream my gaming PC to my living room, which is too far away for an HDMI cord. I can get 1440p @ 120fps with no issues.
I got a rock-5-itx in the before times with a decadent 32GB of RAM. It’s my home server, and it’s currently using 19/31GB:
The headroom is nice, I guess. Sometimes I spin up whole desktop dev environments I can access remotely.
Two things I’ve found that really help having more ram for on the pi’s:
- Any kind of docker image.
- Build times if you use the pi as an agent/runner for gitlab-ce.
I guess that makes sense. Personally I don’t see SBCs as very good Docker hosts or build machines. Aren’t build times and such affected much more by the weak CPU? Obviously if the system starts swapping, then sure, having more RAM to avoid that helps a lot.
The following has been my own experience:
On a pi, you’re much more likely to run out of memory than cpu compute. The increased memory gives you more concurrent things to run…images etc.
Back when I got them and they were just north of a 100 bucks it made a lot of sense. Not so much with current prices.
Having them tho, I really enjoy using them with poe. Their idle power draw is very low. Which is great for budget homelabs. But if I was looking for hardware today I’d look for used nucs.
Been on a NUC for years and if this thing finally shits the bed I’ll be on eBay hunting another one. Neat thing with NUCs is you can pick your price point and get a unit from $<100-$3,000.
It’s the end of the personal computer era. Who’d have thought it was going to be so soon. Or at all.
Be of good cheer. The AI bubble will pop and drag the economy down so hard you’ll be more worried about food than your PC.
I feel like RPI lost the plot at some point. Like the entire point of them was a small minimal headless system that runs low end programs and scripts like a dns server or home automation system. I don’t really see why something like that needs 16 gb of ram(or a nearly 400$ price point). At the new pricing, why would anyone want to go for a Pi vs just getting a low end pc which contains actual hardware meant for higher end systems.
I guess form factor? I feel like you are just artificially restricting yourself going with the higher end pi’s vs just biting the bullet and going with a normal system.
Also I feel I should mention that this was also the same company that decided to link the ram to the firmware meaning you no longer can buy a pi and then solder a new ram on it. They claimed it was to prevent counterfeit sellers putting bad ram in it but, it still puts a bad taste in my mouth. The only way to bypass it is to go back to the 2024-9-23 firmware.
The entire point of them was to be a cheap, open, educational computer for kids. Even the hobbyist/homelab use-case lost the plot, let alone the commercial bullshit they’re targeting these days!
honestly I would argue that is the same plot(or at least overlapping). Low end systems would be an entry level use case for sysadmin and network design. that’s how I got started, I had an RPI that I used as a DNS, file backup and a chat bot I ran, learned a lot from the experience. But I can see how it could be taken into the commercial field as well.
I’ll admit that being a cheap way for adults to learn is plot-adjacent. But at its core, Raspberry Pi was intended to be the spiritual successor of stuff like the BBC Micro, Alan Kay’s KiddieComp/Dynabook, and OLPC.
(The shared purpose and British heritage of the BBC Micro is part of why the Raspberry Pi people picked ARM instead of x86, by the way.)
A raspi with 16gb of ram WTF!? why not just get a SFF PC instead at that point? Unless you specifically need portability or pin IO, I don’t see the appeal of raspi anymore, especially at those prices (almost $400!!!)
last time i bought one was pre-pandemic, not sure exactly how much i paid, but was under $50 new, to hear they are $400 now… i guess i go back under my rock
In 23 I bought my 5 with 8GB for €93, just checked the receipt. I could buy one now for double that. Anyone remembers tech getting cheaper and faster over the years? Pepperidge farm remembers…
I bought several of them when they were 120. But yea at current rate, not really worth it. I will say it’s nice running them off of PoE. Keeps my energy bill lower.
Can you not get IO via a USB connected device/daughter board?
I have an rpi 3, I think from 10 years ago. I run retropi. Emulating up to PSP games works okay. Anything more than that it can’t do so well.
Does anyone know if retropi on an rpi5 is better when emulating “newer” consoles? I feel like I might be better off just using an old laptop. But I like the small form factor on my tv shelf. And the retropi menu / interface. (I’m guessing that should run on a Debian laptop though?)I paid $99 for one on 10/25/25 from microcenter
Stop buying them then. Put them out of business. This shit would be over with in a week if people quit participating.
No, because it is not people buying that drives RAM price up. It is data centers. People not buying just makes consumer facing companies go bankrupt. It will not bring down prices.
Got a list of those consumer facing companies going bankrupt?
Meizu decided to drop out of phone manufacturing because of RAM price. Same with ASUS. Nothing decided not to release a CMF phone this year because of RAM prices.
All major consumer hardware manufacturers reports thinner margins.
Do you have any reason to believe they all lies even if wholesale RAM prices are public and show increased manufacturing costs?
Wait I thought you said bankrupt?
“If” people stop buying. People is still buying.
… I’m confused at what you’re even arguing at this point.
It’s not RPi’s fault that AI datacenters have bought up the entirety of the world’s RAM production for the next couple of years and drove prices through the roof. They have to buy RAM for their boards just like the rest of us.
When I built my last server, 64 GB of DDR5-6400 ECC RDIMM was $550, and even that was inflated since ~6 months earlier it was closer to $350. Last I checked, that exact same SKU is over $3000 now. 16 GB might not sound like a lot, but with RAM prices being what they are, that’s the vast majority of the RPi’s price at this point. Not buying an RPi at these prices won’t drive the prices back down when the manufacturer literally can’t build the boards for any less than that.
