Unless you have a true, irreplaceable need for a 16GB model, everyone should just pretend they don't exist.
Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at. Now that the people who need a desktop or server have re-discovered that they're better off using an actual desktop or an actual server for their purposes, we should get back to treating these like embedded systems boards.
I ended up buying a used Lenovo Mini PC for $200 from a local seller, found on Facebook. It's an i7 something or other with 32GB RAM, I think I got pretty lucky with the find. Much cheaper than a Raspberry Pi considering I didn't need the pins anyway.
If you do need something like a raspberry pi I think the Arduino Uno Q is a solid choice. The 4 GB RAM variant is iirc $80 or so.
The cost of 16GB Raspberry Pi is driven by the RAM. Everything else is a small addition to the BOM cost.
The 16GB was introduced when it was affordable. Now it's just becoming a mental obstacle for buyers who think they should only purchase something if they can get the top model. That's why I suggest everyone pretend it doesn't exist. Unless you really need it for something, the 4GB or 8GB can do most things.
A price increase in one market can displace demand to other markets.
A workstation user or gamer might want a desktop PC loaded with DDR5. But they'll also consider a desktop with DDR4 or even a laptop with LPDDR4X if they get more for their money.
So a rise in demand/prices for DDR5 can trigger a lesser rise in demand/prices for LPDDR4X
The RPI was really good because it was a powerful SOC that ran Linux with lots of GPIO and easy to operate. Now there are a dime a dozen ESP32 based projects that give you the same flexibility. You should almost never buy a RPI for projects these days, its completely overkill
Unless you designed a product around the RPI as your compute module, and now you're stuck. I was recently at the contract manufacturer that's building my company's product - they have a number of clients in this situation.
You could respin, but you can't get that Broadcom part because Fuck You, We're Broadcom™. So now you're looking at a whole new platform if you want to proceed. It's still cheaper to pay loanshark prices for RPIs... for now.
As the sibling comment shows, the very latest ESP32 model (S31, not S3) can run Linux. But they can only access maybe 64MB of RAM, and most boards for sale will have significantly less.
In reality, though, the use cases where you need Linux and GPIO are very slim. It's overkill, an ESP32 is realistically more than powerful enough, and Linux isn't even good for GPIO.
On ESP32, its also quite fine to run FreeRTOS, and you can quite reasonably write cross-platform code which runs on both FreeRTOS and Linux, if that's important.
I was confused the other day when I was browsing ESP32 on Aliexpress and found models with a price tag of 30~60 euros instead of a couple of bucks. So those models have enough silicon to run a general full fledged OS. Picture me impressed!
I have a Raspberry Pi 500 I regularly use as personal admin computer, it is great and just works for all the things you can do with a personal computer.
That's not to say I don't have much beefier work computers - I do - but for the rPi 500 is a perfectly cromulent home computer. It's a computer. I just plug it in, it works.
I just got a Minisforum UM870 Slim with AMD Ryzen™ 7 8745H for €304 (taxes included + €30 shipping), and sourced locally used SODIMM DDR5 RAM at ~120 EUR for 16GB: I'd certainly take a full-fledged mini PC at 450 EUR than a Pi at 385 USD + VAT + customs fee (pretty much the same price most likely).
Yes, I'm missing an NVMe SSD in there too, but I've got a bunch of older 512GB drives around from upgraded computers.
Power usage is probably lower on the Pi5, but likely not by much anymore in the idle state.
I'm honestly not even sure what a good use case is for a Raspberry Pi proper at this point. It sits somewhat awkwardly between things that microcontrollers can handle(*) and things that, as you mentioned, NUCs or old computers or used laptops (or even used phones!) with removed batteries can handle.
*: I am so glad we're finally out of the phase where people were using Pis for hobbyist tasks where an Arduino would have worked just fine. Especially now that there are so many cheap, accessible microcontrollers. ESP32s obviously, but Raspberry's own RP2040/RP2350 have been more useful to me than the Pis themselves ever were.
The 1GB RPI4 can definitely not be used as a main desktop. I make my son use a Raspberry Pi 5 with 4GB of RAM to code simple stuff for school, and it's barely usable because the UI is extremely laggy.
Maybe you could get a bit more perf out of it using a lighter environment. Sway and a terminal text editor (if vim is too much for your son, maybe micro would be better for its CUA binds) would probably run well. Avoid the web browser, or maybe try a lighter one like w3m.
Yep, the small form factor market is amazing now. A cheap N100 blows any RPi away and will be similar in cost and power consumption. You also get nifty things like a semi-usable iGPU and QuickSync which is perfect for transcoding.
People are irrationally obsessed with the idea of a very small cheap computer that could replace their laptop or desktop, for no reason.
If you created a little cube the size of an Apple Watch with built in WiFi and Bluetooth, and maybe put a little LED screen on it, and it could run Linux and could be powered with POE and USB-C or something, people would feel an urge to just buy one, with no real use case for it.
> Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
Oh yup... I'm running unbound (DNS resolver) at home 24/7 on a Pi 3 from 2015 since years and years. Zero issue. I run that on a Pi because that one really needs to be on 24/7 and hardly consumes any resources (I mean: it's just DNS queries). But a Pi simply ain't good for much more than that.
> I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
I fully agree. For the proper stuff I encourage anyone to buy used enterprise gear with proper RAM (i.e. ECC RAM) and a proper CPU (like a Xeon).
I've got four NUCs too but the real workhorse is a used Xeon with ECC RAM.
> The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at.
I agree. I've got like seven Pi (I was an early adopter of those) but don't ever plan to buy another.
It's like you said: they lost the plot (not just the community: those who make them too).
> because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The thing is, they are all x86. The currently available ways to get an ARM general purpose computer are... Raspberry, Raspberry clones of various degrees of shittyness, Apple's lineup and a few Chromebooks plus even rarer Windows systems that no one wants because nothing runs on them.
x86 is generally better, because it's a standardized platform that is universally supported. With ARM you inevitably run into headaches if you expect to run an OS that isn't provided by the manufacturer.
> Windows systems that no one wants because nothing runs on them
You might want to give Windows on Arm another spin if you haven't touched it lately, because you're either operating on very outdated information or you work in a very narrow field. Everything I tried throwing at it runs on mine. Exceptions are some drivers and kernel mode anticheat in games.
They got 3% of market share [1]. That's laughable, no one tests for that, and I personally won't touch Qualcomm crap with a ten foot pole if I can avoid it.
I cannot emphasize this enough: if you actually care about performance, forget about 16GB vs 8GB and switch from using the internal SD card and to an external SSD. I wrote up my experience at https://honeypot.net/2023/03/20/upgrade-your-raspberry.html
Once you've done that, and your max latency has dropped to 0.7% of what it use to be (yes, really, the SD card had 140x higher latency than the SSD on my system), carve out 32GB for swap and call it done. This will give you vastly better throughput on any likely use case that's not purely dependent on RAM size alone.
If I were using this as a portable desktop system, like I am with my uConsole, I'd rather have 4GB of RAM and fast storage than 16GB and the SD card. One of them is fine, just a little sluggish sometimes. The other is pretty nice, until it grinds to a halt for minutes at a time. If `apt upgrade` is your benchmark, SSD >> RAM by a wide margin.
The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
>The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
My family (n=3) owned the Huawei P20 Pro (acquired at the same time in the same promo, perhaps the same batch?). This product line seems to have serious issues with battery swelling. Each phone had spicy pillows at some point within 2 years of ownership. Even outside the warranty period, Huawei was willing to replace the battery at their cost, at their contracted Toronto repair centre. Each of the repaired phones had their spicy pillows return within 6-9 months. Huawei was still willing to repair the phones, but at that point I'd rather have recycled it. I strongly suspect Huawei was avoiding doing a voluntary recall and triaging it through their RMA process, given how little resistance their customer support put up (they immediately sent back an RMA label without requiring any pictures).
FWIW I have a P30 Pro that I used for 5 years without a hitch, and still sits fully functioning in a box serving as a backup in case my current phone gets damaged. So that generation likely did not have the same issue.
I did the opposite. I built an x86 version of Android TV because typical ARM Android TV boxes are underpowered garbage and the locked bootloaders prevent replacement of the OS. My x86 build on a NUC just flies and is 100% under my control without Google or OEM crapware.
If you’re in the U.S - look into Walmart’s ONN boxes. They’re cheap and have great performance. Specifically the ONN 4k pro. They’re not even bloated with apps. The apps that are installed can easily be removed. In addition, easy to side load apps and customize.
There is Android TalkBack (for poor vision) which is available on first boot/factory reset that narrates the menu. Even with a completely broken screen you can get ADB set up.
That's very creative actually. Might be quite dated but most of the workarounds I've heard of involve plugging in a OTG cable that supports display-out and a mouse.
Doesn't Android have rather aggressive battery saving features which kill processes and put the phone to sleep after so long of being idle? Is there an easy way around that?
The battery is a free built-in UPS and isn't a fire hazard unless the charging electronics were designed spectacularly poorly. The BMS knows to stop charging the battery when it's full. All of these phones probably use the same set of well-known BMS chips, I would imagine.
Several methods. You can run a MQTT server, Lightweight HTTP Server or even just serial over USB. Literally the world is your oyster. Extra special points if you do HTTP over ethernet
That reminds me how I once dropped my phone into a vat of industrial solvent; not for very long, but enough for just a drop or so to enter via the charging port. The substance gradually separated layers of the screen. Touch worked, but the big black blob in the OLED eventually overtook the entire screen. Before it went completely dark, I enabled screenshot upload (aside from camera roll) to Dropbox. Then it was just a matter of taking screenshots and measured taps to turn the phone into a very fine GSM modem/wi-fi router as I looked into getting another phone.
Rooting with a completely melted screen would be a little harder, but hey, maybe rooting could be done by following the instructions step-by-step with a little faith, and then post-root the USB might work with an external portable monitor? I'm sure it's a solvable problem.
Not in my area at least. People gut the RAM from them now to sell separately for profit, and often the HDD too for privacy, so you're basically buying a paper weight that's a motherboard in a shell.
There's laptops or X86 tablets with soldered RAM but those are rare and vanish immediately if they show up at a good price.
Sure... but... the original $35 RasPi is closer to a modern RasPi Zero 1, which looks like it's selling for $45 - $50 on Amazon.
Modern top-of-the-line RasPis seem more like ARM PCs with fast, efficient multi-core CPUs and GigE. I bought a RasPi 500 at the beginning of the year just to see what it was like and it's my new "email and light web browsing" daily-driver. Though yeah, I probably wouldn't have paid $410 for it.
I bought my original RasPi mostly for the I/O. I wanted to blink some lights, drive some servos. And if I wanted to do that again, I would probably buy a Pico or Zero.
Absolutely. Amazon isn't the go-to place to pick up electronics. I think I picked it because prices there are probably the highest you'll reasonably find for Pi stuff. Though they often have availability when everyone else is out of stock (likely because they have a bit more mark up than most everyone else.)
You would think... but if you don't have to run the 13 year old computer at full tilt, then the power difference may be minimal. The LEON SoS SPARC clones I used wound up consuming MUCH less power than modern intel cores.
And CPU power consumption is only part of the whole system. And a lot of the system power scales with bus speed rather than inverse CPU age. It's possible recent systems will consume more electrons than older systems.
I have a 60 year old computer attached to my Minuteman III and it's doing fine. A 13 year old computer that still works is a computer that still works. And if it's worked 13 years, then it might last another 13 years (unlike the Intel NUC that died after 18 months.)
If you need GPIO pins, ESP32 is good enough for lots of use cases. If you just need a small low-power PC, used enterprise thin clients and mini-pc's (google project tinyminimicro) offer more while still idling around 10W or less. Those can be still bought for like 40-100 USD with SSD and 8GB or more RAM included.
I think Raspberry Pi is worth it only for some niche use-cases with current prices.
Presumably the only customers buying Pis right now are companies who use them in their products. There are much better options on the used market for people needing small computers/servers.
You know, a RPi 5 1GB is $77, 4GB is $109, 8GB is $170 and 16GB is $385. None of it makes sense, especially if anyone starts a reballing shop.
I was looking to try out Joel's TrueNAS on ARM this time with a Pi 5, a PoE and NVMe Hat ... I decided against it and ended up getting a good old cheap x86 compact NAS instead.
Same. Also because the margins are so high due to competition on the buyer side, bottlenecked by production which will continue to increase until there can be price competition on the producer side again.
I think we'll see prices crash within 12 months, because I don't think the data center bubble will last that long.
Market bubbles bursting doesn't lead to consumer price drops. The reduced demand from data centres will lead to a reduction in manufacturing rather a lower price.
That's cope. We might get a small dip, just like we saw in stocks. Inventing machine intelligence unlocks a lot of automation and innovation. Any data centers the labs and hyperscalers manage to get online the next few years will get filled by demand.
The first real problem machine intelligence companies could solve for their own good is how to avoid the current bottleneck in compute. Until then they are as subject to usual market behavior as any other kind of business out there.
I have a little Linux box that I've been trying to use more frequently instead of my MacBook. Partially just for fun, partially because I want to decouple a little bit from the Apple ecosystem.
I was having a ton of stability issues: my filesystem would randomly go read-only after a few minutes. After trawling through my system logs, Claude suggested that it was a memory issue. I ran MemTest86 and it bailed out after 10,000 errors.
So now I was very depressed because RAM prices are sky-high and I currently cannot justify spending ~$150---more than what I paid for when I got this box used off of Ebay mind you---to replace the RAM inside.
Then I remembered my wife had an old laptop she hasn't touched in years lying around. I popped it open and, lo and behold, the RAM was compatible! I felt very fortunate that I was able to do that. Thoughts and prayers for all the folks who need memory---I've felt the despair.
I have been buying and using Raspberry Pi 400 (Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 ARM v8 64-bit SoC running at 1.8 GHz, 4GB LPDDR4-3200 RAM) that goes from $50 to $39 (Microcenter yesterday). One can do a lot with this.
For everything else, either go lower level with ESP32 or higher level with a mini pc.
About half a year ago, I bought a new Chuwi Minibook X with Intel N150 CPU, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for less than that. AFAIK, it's still available for about the same price, and it seems like a lot more value for the money.
ESP32 devices are still cheap enough but with a less-good ecosystems due to the Pi's popularity. I do plan on picking up a few Pi 2 Ws which are still selling at a MicroCenter near me for $18 with only three bucks of markup just for setting up a Pi-Hole and some other IoT project but yeah, looking at even the Chinese made boards like Raspberry Orange sees prices north of $70 which is just not worth it for something with this capability. At this point, why not just get a refurb'd thin client or mini-pc?
Esp32 is pretty damn powerful for the cost. We have one driving a display and keyboard, speaking and playing synthesize sounds through attached sound chip, driving an ADC over SPI at a high rate and talking Bluetooth to an attached device and talking wifi to the cloud. On a device that costs a few bucks.
It started at $35/unit, in the United States at least. I've still got the invoice for my 256MB Model B...
$35 today gets you a 1GB Pi 4 Model B. For somebody who actually needs the form factor, it's pretty much a fine value.
For somebody who wants a server, it's always been a weird choice. (sorry Jeff :D )
For somebody who wants a desktop, the Raspberry Pi 500+ was a really fun choice when I bought mine in January. They cost twice as much today, which is sad. (although if anyone is feeling the desire and lives near a store, Microcenter has them on sale for $100 off...)
It also has twice the RAM of the original Raspberry Pi (at launch), plus WiFi, plus a lot of CPU power, and a powerful GPU, and a lot more.
I have a 16GB model and I use that much RAM for some specific development work on the Raspberry Pi platform, but now I wish they had never announced the 16GB model. It has created so many complaints from people who shouldn't and won't be buying it.
It depends a lot on your use case. For headless stuff (automation that mostly uses the GPIO, for instance, or running a few "old school" server processes), you usually don't need that much RAM. However, when used as desktop computers, 8GB becomes the bare minimum to run a modern Web browser with a few tabs...
Attaching 16 GB of precious RAM to that cheap weak SoC is, at this point, a waste of resources. The original idea was - cheap SoC + cheap RAM = cheap SBC. The SoC is still cheap and crappy but the RAM is now worth so much more. The pairing no longer makes any practical sense.
RPi Foundation decided who their customers were during and after the pandemic, no doubt thanks to years of community goodwill put into an increasingly uncompetitive product, especially so now. The good thing is the world moved on, there's tons of alternatives, and you really should look elsewhere and also past SBCs for anything with that much RAM.
I don't mean this with snark, but who did they land on? I have struggled to place the Pi for a long time because the range of things it can do is so broad, but then it gets limited by things like using an SD card for primary storage (which can fail). So while this could be a perfectly good home server, I wouldn't be able to rely on the boot drive. It also makes a really good first computer, but leaving it naked doesn't mean I can slot it in front of my kiddos and hope they'll be fine. I keep a Pi running attached to a monitor in my kitchen running a Home Assistant dashboard, and that's pretty good, but is that the sweet spot?
The Pi 5 (and 4?) can boot from external hard drives, including NVMe SSDs over PCIe. Granted, you're limited to PCIe 2.0 x1 (~1 Gb/s) or USB 3 (5 Gb/s), but the point still stands.
It's not as locked down as you might think. I was surprised how easy it was to root a couple of devices, one an old pixel and one a pretty new one
It's definitely a bit odd, the Android environment, but I didn't feel blocked on it. Also ended up unrooting one because termux and the built in debian VM on Android now give everything I need
Termux + X11+ XFCE is surprisingly nice on a vanilla phone
My 4 is, but only after a good while as my home server until I bumped up against the limitations of the hardware and upgraded to a proper server. So I suppose it did its job as a home lab gateway drug.
Yeah, currently I have a 3B, 2B and an original wifi-free zero in a drawer.
The 3B was my Octoprint server for the longest time while I was testing the 4B for a product, but for reasons I don't really understand, the 3B isn't quite punchy enough for Klipper, when it fully should be; it drops connections to the printer. I think any of them may continue to have some uses but perhaps not till I move to a new place.
Haven't gone for a 5B or Zero 2W yet, don't really need to. Rather more interested in what happens with the Picos these days.
Yeah, this is ridiculous - I am a long term Sailfosh OS user nad of course, when Jolla, the company behind it (of Nokia/Maemo/Meego fame) after fighting of at least 2 bankruptcies over the years finally releases new phone (they were selling SFOS licenses for Sony phones in the meantime) this insanity has to happen, forcing them to make their baby more expensive. :P
Unless they're part of the executive branch that order doesn't apply. (Which is kind of too bad, under the "if it actually works it gets a name and isn't AI anymore" rules we need a new name... but This Isn't It.)
The prices are crazy, but the uncertainty makes the choices even harder. I have my eyes on a Framework laptop 13 for some time. I was considering buying it with less RAM now, and then buying more RAM later. Now what I fear is: by the time RAM prices become reasonable, we might as well be using DDR7. So, even with a custom-built desktop PC or a Framework laptop it would be a pity to have to upgrade everything. On the other hand, it may well be our new reality, so maybe better buying in into 64GB RAM now? Not even sure if my reasoning is correct.
Guessing you don't actually need it and you're just thinking of getting it for fun? Because if you need one and you only need 32GB of ram today then you could just buy that for now and pay the cost of upgrading whatever the ram price is in the future if you need to. And if you last until the DDR7 days when ram prices finally go down then great, you saved by not getting the full 64 GB
The article you've linked makes no claim that it has anything to do with greed any everything to do with protecting the supply chain since there is currently a large monetary incentive for people to fuck with it.
They have been struggling for years to match supply with demand, and RAM arbitrage would undermine those efforts... and the market would be flooded with flaky boards remanufactured in the cheapest possible way.
They have to plan their production in advance, with budgeting, contracts, and prices decided before the products are even manufactured. This is hard to do even when you're just trying to plan for the demands of legitimate buyers.
But every single day in the meantime, RAM prices will continue fluctuate, and arbitrage takes advantage of this. And arbitrate markets don't even necessarily track new RAM prices, if someone dumps a bunch of used LPDDR devices in China, people may harvest used memory for arbitrage.
For example, lets say they plan for how many people want to actually buy a 1GB Pi 5. Then they produce that amount. Then scalpers (hypothetically) realize they scape old RAM off discarded cable TV boxes for less than the OEM pays for new RAM. Then the legitimate 1GB Pis will be quickly scalped up off the market, and the market will be flooded with modified boards of higher capacities.
It says so right in the article. People were flooding the market with cheap/counterfeit/misconfigured Raspberry Pis and the organization was on the hook for support and dealing with angry customers.
I have not seen any evidence of "flooding". Just a couple posts about it. And one of those posts was saying theirs did work with the old firmware, so for that instance the Pi folks deserve the full blame for adding a check that disabled booting.
I also don't see any mention of it in this article?
well, of course people are still "learning to program" it's just everyone gets to be sitting in the chair of an academic or the start up chair, or whatever.
Since they're still improving models, they still are learning how to program, it's just a meta game now, not the specific intricacies.
As a 53 year old, I've been starting to feel like there's a very real chance I will never buy another brand new computer (for personal use), phone or gaming console in my lifetime, which would be very surprising if you told this to me ~2 years ago.
If my computer fails, I have plenty of old components from older systems that I can swap in. I also have quite a few old phones (my primary job over the past decade has been Android development, so I have older test devices that still function fine for my purposes). And consoles are just very optional (and way more costly than I am willing to pay) when they start costing $1500+.
Overall there are some positives from this, I'll be responsible for less e-waste. This is something I always tried to be cognizant of in the first place, but the economics will really force my hand even more.
Of course, things aren't all that great considering we got into this situation due to technology running in large datacenters running on lots of dirty power like methane turbines.
It will stop when the data center bubble bursts. Right now a small group of companies are borrowing huge amounts of money to corner the market in compute in order to use it for AI. But there's no evidence that real AI revenue (as opposed to more borrowed money) will grow fast enough for them to pay for that debt, or that profit margins will be sufficient to make it worth it over the window they need to start recouping. When that realization hits the lenders and investors and the capital spigot shuts off, prices will crash. I think it will be very similar to a precious metals run-up.
I keep thinking that the AI gold rush is not an AI gold rush at all. It is a way to monopolize computing in 2 steps:
1) AI really does require a scaleup in compute power. In other words: you will be upgrading your hardware or use old software (at least if you want to run local or host your own saas)
2) the AI buildout means you can't buy the hardware, you can only rent it "in the cloud", because the AI buildout makes everything too expensive. Including memory, a nonnegotiable component of any computer or server
It only works, of course, if Amazon and Google and Meta and ... keep buying for another 2-3 years but that seems to be exactly what's happening.
Worst of all: monopolies used to at least require investment. But Amazon and Google aren't investing, really. They're still net profitable companies. It's almost insulting.
Classical monopoly (or duopoly) requires a moat. This is the moat they build. Everyone will just rent centralized intelligence - that's a promise to investors.
Yeah, but the key here is: the moat is not AI at all! The moat is they're buying all new computers (the key components). Every last one. So you can't buy one, you will be renting one, at seriously increased prices.
That's an interesting take. I had a similar thought about safety and how AI providers propagate that using cloud options is safer because hosting a server is open to attack vectors, and who would manage that best if not the big providers themselves.
The fact that Hugging Face was attacked not by a small amount of compute but such a vast amount of computation. It was only possible because its already so centralized by Open AI.
It feels a bit like cyberpunk where only the big companies in reality will have the resource to pull of such an attack.
The thing with DDR3 RAM is as I understand it not really an "also". It's not that they are made differently it's just that the demand for "the best" RAM is so high that all production is going there. The DDR3 market isn't just as willing to pay such a markup.
Makes sense. I have a few old servers I still have running as CI runners, recently dished out more for 32gb of DDR3 than I did for equivalent DDR4 back in 2021. :(
Multiple theories have spawned regarding the usage, I strongly suspect that they are being used in drones for military purposes, hence the shortage at some point and the prices that are skyrocketing.
If you just want a computer, an Ayn Thor is +$90. It comes with 1TB of UFS 3.1 storage, not one but two fantastic OLED screens, nice joysticks, speakers, and it's much much much faster.
And it runs a fantastic CachyOS (a super tuned Arch) install, called ArmadaOS,
https://armadaos.dev/
2026 has been pretty amazing, with the slow work upstreaming Qualcomm support really building. A bunch of really great chipsets have mainline support and actually work. The Thor is a bit behind SM8550, but SM8650 and SM8750 handhelds are also available (just a bit pricier, and non-dual screen yet).
Alas most phones don't have unlockable boot loaders. I'm anti-interested in the sad experience of Android, being unable to read my own files off my device. I really want to be able to read my chrome profile data, for reasons. Absolutely no go.
I'd much rather buy a 5 year old mini Dell (or Nuc or whatever) that I can reliably put Linux on than some kind of one-off thing like this.
Call me cynical after being burned countless times on niche-ass platforms. Even my Framework 13" has a flurry of issues I've never seen on more mainstream hardware. Life is too short to worry about bizarre firmware issues in hardware that no one is paid to support.
There's plenty of reason to be conservative and that's a solid recommendation. My own i5-8600t nuc continues to tick away!
I for one am delighted that you can buy a modern-ish high performance, advanced processing node based system, that's small, that has such incredible capabilities, that's super power efficient. And that finally it runs a mean Linux!
He has seemingly been doing a mostly second channel stuff lately. Those rarely make the front page as they are usually just "here is a thing I personally found interesting" projects.
You'll be told its the RAM price, but Amazon can deliver qty 1 of an equivalent speed ram (its technically slightly faster than DDR4 but much slower than DDR5) to my door tomorrow morning with sales tax for about $120. No one can explain why the other parts cost about $300. Note that "about $300" will buy you a 24 core Intel Ultra 7, the Amazon model is $350 because its unlocked for overclocking for those who don't think 24 cores at 3.7 GHz is fast enough. I'm sure the RasPi is much faster LOL.
You'll be told its the price of PCBs and chips, but again, the same company can deliver a box of three Xiao brand ESP32 dev boards to my door tomorrow morning for a hair over $20 including tax and shipping and handling.
You'll be told its a temporary supply chain disruption until you remember they've been pulling that scam for some years now, and as long as people fall for it and throw money at them, they'll keep pushing it.
The problem is they sold out to the hardcover textbook manufacturer business model. Take the head of the EE dept out for dinner and box seats at last night's sportsball game, suspiciously the EE department syllabus now says you need to buy it or else, and the seller says now that its a mandatory purchase "will pay anything for an education" in response they will charge "anything" which apparently is $385. See also Boomers and "will pay anything for medical care" well they know that and wait until you see the bill LOL. Also see real estate bubbles.
I don't see why they don't raise the price to that of an Apple Neo laptop. Its the same market and business model, pay what we ask or die uneducated and unemployed under a freeway overpass. Don't you want your kids to learn STEM and be successful? Well that'll be $385. Its the new "World Book Encyclopedia" scam.
Unless you have a true, irreplaceable need for a 16GB model, everyone should just pretend they don't exist.
Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at. Now that the people who need a desktop or server have re-discovered that they're better off using an actual desktop or an actual server for their purposes, we should get back to treating these like embedded systems boards.
I ended up buying a used Lenovo Mini PC for $200 from a local seller, found on Facebook. It's an i7 something or other with 32GB RAM, I think I got pretty lucky with the find. Much cheaper than a Raspberry Pi considering I didn't need the pins anyway.
If you do need something like a raspberry pi I think the Arduino Uno Q is a solid choice. The 4 GB RAM variant is iirc $80 or so.
I get it that it's not necessary but the ram upgrade from 8 to 16 used to be a $40 splurge, and that was with healthy profits for everyone involved.
And now you pay the old 16GB price for 4GB.
This applies to all RAM.
The cost of 16GB Raspberry Pi is driven by the RAM. Everything else is a small addition to the BOM cost.
The 16GB was introduced when it was affordable. Now it's just becoming a mental obstacle for buyers who think they should only purchase something if they can get the top model. That's why I suggest everyone pretend it doesn't exist. Unless you really need it for something, the 4GB or 8GB can do most things.
Yes. RAM got expensive, because demand went up a lot.
Is there a lot of new demand for the kind of RAM on a RPi?
This is not the same stuff an H100 uses, and it’s not even made in the same facilities, is it?
I think it’s more likely that the volume is not large enough to make up for the previously crappy margins on cheap RAM products.
It was great while it lasted.
A price increase in one market can displace demand to other markets.
A workstation user or gamer might want a desktop PC loaded with DDR5. But they'll also consider a desktop with DDR4 or even a laptop with LPDDR4X if they get more for their money.
So a rise in demand/prices for DDR5 can trigger a lesser rise in demand/prices for LPDDR4X
> RAM got expensive, because demand went up a lot.
Somewhat, but not all of that demand was real; some of it was promised and not followed through on.
Also, supply isn't growing to match, in part because some companies exited the business.
The RPI was really good because it was a powerful SOC that ran Linux with lots of GPIO and easy to operate. Now there are a dime a dozen ESP32 based projects that give you the same flexibility. You should almost never buy a RPI for projects these days, its completely overkill
Unless you designed a product around the RPI as your compute module, and now you're stuck. I was recently at the contract manufacturer that's building my company's product - they have a number of clients in this situation.
You could respin, but you can't get that Broadcom part because Fuck You, We're Broadcom™. So now you're looking at a whole new platform if you want to proceed. It's still cheaper to pay loanshark prices for RPIs... for now.
Do you have any references to ESP32 running Linux?
As the sibling comment shows, the very latest ESP32 model (S31, not S3) can run Linux. But they can only access maybe 64MB of RAM, and most boards for sale will have significantly less.
In reality, though, the use cases where you need Linux and GPIO are very slim. It's overkill, an ESP32 is realistically more than powerful enough, and Linux isn't even good for GPIO.
On ESP32, its also quite fine to run FreeRTOS, and you can quite reasonably write cross-platform code which runs on both FreeRTOS and Linux, if that's important.
Well, in many use cases it acts as a single use device & does not run Linux or any OS at all.
It controls whatevwhatever hardware, reads some sensors, etc.
Then when needed gets oders from a normal computer over network or BLE via some simple protocol.
Sup. They just dropped some new hotness that does in fact run Linux. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/91-hardware/19197-the-esp...
I was confused the other day when I was browsing ESP32 on Aliexpress and found models with a price tag of 30~60 euros instead of a couple of bucks. So those models have enough silicon to run a general full fledged OS. Picture me impressed!
> Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
Not only that, I bet most hobby use cases can be served fine by the older and cheaper Raspberry Pi 2, 3 or 4 models, which are still being sold.
I have a Raspberry Pi 500 I regularly use as personal admin computer, it is great and just works for all the things you can do with a personal computer.
That's not to say I don't have much beefier work computers - I do - but for the rPi 500 is a perfectly cromulent home computer. It's a computer. I just plug it in, it works.
I just got a Minisforum UM870 Slim with AMD Ryzen™ 7 8745H for €304 (taxes included + €30 shipping), and sourced locally used SODIMM DDR5 RAM at ~120 EUR for 16GB: I'd certainly take a full-fledged mini PC at 450 EUR than a Pi at 385 USD + VAT + customs fee (pretty much the same price most likely).
Yes, I'm missing an NVMe SSD in there too, but I've got a bunch of older 512GB drives around from upgraded computers.
Power usage is probably lower on the Pi5, but likely not by much anymore in the idle state.
> sourced locally used SODIMM DDR5 RAM at ~120 EUR for 16GB
So how much was it new?
More than double on Amazon, around 280~300 euro for a single stick of 16GB DDR5, sigh...
It's $327 on their web store.
I'm honestly not even sure what a good use case is for a Raspberry Pi proper at this point. It sits somewhat awkwardly between things that microcontrollers can handle(*) and things that, as you mentioned, NUCs or old computers or used laptops (or even used phones!) with removed batteries can handle.
*: I am so glad we're finally out of the phase where people were using Pis for hobbyist tasks where an Arduino would have worked just fine. Especially now that there are so many cheap, accessible microcontrollers. ESP32s obviously, but Raspberry's own RP2040/RP2350 have been more useful to me than the Pis themselves ever were.
This. If you need NAS, get a fanless mini PC, and you get a zero maintenance device with zero noise as cheap as AliExpress can make it.
Yeah basically take lowest ram RPi if you need GPIO for the sensors/actuators whatever hook it up via network to NUC or Minisforum.
If you don’t need GPIO just go with NUC/Minisforum.
> Unless you have a true, irreplaceable need for a 16GB model
I need to `npm install strip`
They hated Jesus because He told the truth
A Pi 4 is my son's primary computer, GCompris, Tux Racer, my vibe coded apps for him are the primary use cases.
GCompris and Tux Racer were launched over 20 years ago.
They would be fine with the low RAM models.
This is my point above: Most people should ignore the 16GB model.
Are they using the gpio/i2c/spi at all? Otherwise literally anything else is better.
Even if using those, if it's not in a robot or a weatherproof box on a pole or something, then a usb gpio dongle on a pc or mac makes 900x more sense.
The fact that something is done does not serve as an example that something makes any sense to do.
Using a pi for a computer is like when women knit sweaters for things that don't benefit from sweaters.
And at $400 it doesn't make sense for it to be. You could buy a much better computer for the same price.
> And at $400 it doesn't make sense for it to be.
Why are so many people angry at a situation that doesn't exist?
The use cases above don't need a $385 16GB Raspberry Pi 5.
Did you notice they weren't even using a Raspberry Pi 5?
A 1GB Raspberry Pi 4, which would run those applications, is $35 and in stock: https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-1gb/
The 1GB RPI4 can definitely not be used as a main desktop. I make my son use a Raspberry Pi 5 with 4GB of RAM to code simple stuff for school, and it's barely usable because the UI is extremely laggy.
You are the one making up a situation here.
Maybe you could get a bit more perf out of it using a lighter environment. Sway and a terminal text editor (if vim is too much for your son, maybe micro would be better for its CUA binds) would probably run well. Avoid the web browser, or maybe try a lighter one like w3m.
Please read the comment thread you're responding to.
I'll quote it for you:
> A Pi 4 is my son's primary computer
So, no, I am not making up a situation.
Yep, the small form factor market is amazing now. A cheap N100 blows any RPi away and will be similar in cost and power consumption. You also get nifty things like a semi-usable iGPU and QuickSync which is perfect for transcoding.
People are irrationally obsessed with the idea of a very small cheap computer that could replace their laptop or desktop, for no reason.
If you created a little cube the size of an Apple Watch with built in WiFi and Bluetooth, and maybe put a little LED screen on it, and it could run Linux and could be powered with POE and USB-C or something, people would feel an urge to just buy one, with no real use case for it.
Cube? Make it an icosahedron and I'm listening
Wat would you even 'mount it on?
If I had a d20 computer, i would probably roll it, not mount it.
> Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
Oh yup... I'm running unbound (DNS resolver) at home 24/7 on a Pi 3 from 2015 since years and years. Zero issue. I run that on a Pi because that one really needs to be on 24/7 and hardly consumes any resources (I mean: it's just DNS queries). But a Pi simply ain't good for much more than that.
> I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
I fully agree. For the proper stuff I encourage anyone to buy used enterprise gear with proper RAM (i.e. ECC RAM) and a proper CPU (like a Xeon).
I've got four NUCs too but the real workhorse is a used Xeon with ECC RAM.
> The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at.
I agree. I've got like seven Pi (I was an early adopter of those) but don't ever plan to buy another.
It's like you said: they lost the plot (not just the community: those who make them too).
The person who pays the electric bill takes issue with your recommendation to use old enterprise gear.
> because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The thing is, they are all x86. The currently available ways to get an ARM general purpose computer are... Raspberry, Raspberry clones of various degrees of shittyness, Apple's lineup and a few Chromebooks plus even rarer Windows systems that no one wants because nothing runs on them.
x86 is generally better, because it's a standardized platform that is universally supported. With ARM you inevitably run into headaches if you expect to run an OS that isn't provided by the manufacturer.
> Windows systems that no one wants because nothing runs on them
You might want to give Windows on Arm another spin if you haven't touched it lately, because you're either operating on very outdated information or you work in a very narrow field. Everything I tried throwing at it runs on mine. Exceptions are some drivers and kernel mode anticheat in games.
They got 3% of market share [1]. That's laughable, no one tests for that, and I personally won't touch Qualcomm crap with a ten foot pole if I can avoid it.
[1] https://itdaily.com/blogs/workplace/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-pc...
They didn't dispute market share, they were just suggesting that the software deficiencies you were pointing out are outdated.
2027 is the year of the Linux.. er. ARM Windows desktop!
x86, so what? What's the problem you are trying to solve? Does arm or x86 matter for them?
What about a $500 Mac Mini?
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
I cannot emphasize this enough: if you actually care about performance, forget about 16GB vs 8GB and switch from using the internal SD card and to an external SSD. I wrote up my experience at https://honeypot.net/2023/03/20/upgrade-your-raspberry.html
Once you've done that, and your max latency has dropped to 0.7% of what it use to be (yes, really, the SD card had 140x higher latency than the SSD on my system), carve out 32GB for swap and call it done. This will give you vastly better throughput on any likely use case that's not purely dependent on RAM size alone.
If I were using this as a portable desktop system, like I am with my uConsole, I'd rather have 4GB of RAM and fast storage than 16GB and the SD card. One of them is fine, just a little sluggish sometimes. The other is pretty nice, until it grinds to a halt for minutes at a time. If `apt upgrade` is your benchmark, SSD >> RAM by a wide margin.
I'm buying up broken screen old Android smartphone instead.
For example I got several broken screen Huawei P20s from 2018, they were 10€ each. 128GB storage with 4GB RAM https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_p20-9107.php
They boot up, you can install termux and then whatever is your choice of Linux software. I run several copyparty instances for friends and family
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/
https://github.com/9001/copyparty
The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
>Huawei P20
>The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
My family (n=3) owned the Huawei P20 Pro (acquired at the same time in the same promo, perhaps the same batch?). This product line seems to have serious issues with battery swelling. Each phone had spicy pillows at some point within 2 years of ownership. Even outside the warranty period, Huawei was willing to replace the battery at their cost, at their contracted Toronto repair centre. Each of the repaired phones had their spicy pillows return within 6-9 months. Huawei was still willing to repair the phones, but at that point I'd rather have recycled it. I strongly suspect Huawei was avoiding doing a voluntary recall and triaging it through their RMA process, given how little resistance their customer support put up (they immediately sent back an RMA label without requiring any pictures).
FWIW I have a P30 Pro that I used for 5 years without a hitch, and still sits fully functioning in a box serving as a backup in case my current phone gets damaged. So that generation likely did not have the same issue.
Android TV boxes are also great.
Slightly more expensive but you won't have to deal with battery health and the new ones come with a 1GB NIC and USB 3 ports!
I did the opposite. I built an x86 version of Android TV because typical ARM Android TV boxes are underpowered garbage and the locked bootloaders prevent replacement of the OS. My x86 build on a NUC just flies and is 100% under my control without Google or OEM crapware.
I've always had bad luck with those. They very quickly start running poorly, maybe because the flash worn out.
they're often packed with malware https://www.androidauthority.com/android-tv-box-maker-google...
why does it matter if you nuke the os and reinstall?
... and they're locked down. Aren't they? What box would you recommend?
If you’re in the U.S - look into Walmart’s ONN boxes. They’re cheap and have great performance. Specifically the ONN 4k pro. They’re not even bloated with apps. The apps that are installed can easily be removed. In addition, easy to side load apps and customize.
There's enough exploits these days, the only advantage of most of these things running on many years old BSPs
To add onto this for others.
There is Android TalkBack (for poor vision) which is available on first boot/factory reset that narrates the menu. Even with a completely broken screen you can get ADB set up.
That's very creative actually. Might be quite dated but most of the workarounds I've heard of involve plugging in a OTG cable that supports display-out and a mouse.
Doesn't Android have rather aggressive battery saving features which kill processes and put the phone to sleep after so long of being idle? Is there an easy way around that?
The battery is a free built-in UPS and isn't a fire hazard unless the charging electronics were designed spectacularly poorly. The BMS knows to stop charging the battery when it's full. All of these phones probably use the same set of well-known BMS chips, I would imagine.
Was considering doing the same until I found a couple old pine64 on eBay for ~$25 (2016, 4 core allwinner CPU, 2gb ddr3)
Sometimes there are pretty good deals on laptops, especially off lease. I've seen some $400-500 w/ 32GB RAM pop up on Slickdeals every few months.
You can get plenty of mini PCs, used computers and used phones in that price range. They aren’t a substitute for owning a raspberry pi though.
How are you getting GPIO?
Use something like this:
Adafruit FT232H Breakout - General Purpose USB to GPIO, SPI, I2C https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264
(or even more cheaply a CH347T board which are dirt cheap on Aliexpress)
Both have decent Python support.
Most likely he doesn't use GPIO, if it's just a tailscale/pi-hole client or something like that.
If you REALLY need GPIO then just add a USB-C OTG MCU board like a ESP32, or even the ancient Arduino Uno works as USB GPIO via serial TTY on Android.
Or just use a ESP32 by itself, if you don't need a full Linux OS, just to toggle some GPIO pins via the internet.
Possibilities are endless. Just use your imagination, or ask some LLM.
How to control the gpio?
Several methods. You can run a MQTT server, Lightweight HTTP Server or even just serial over USB. Literally the world is your oyster. Extra special points if you do HTTP over ethernet
Flash the MCU with a program that takes a text protocol over the UART from the host and uses it to control its GPIOs
How did you get into the phones with broken screen?
The screen glass is cracked but you can still read what's on the display to root it.
That reminds me how I once dropped my phone into a vat of industrial solvent; not for very long, but enough for just a drop or so to enter via the charging port. The substance gradually separated layers of the screen. Touch worked, but the big black blob in the OLED eventually overtook the entire screen. Before it went completely dark, I enabled screenshot upload (aside from camera roll) to Dropbox. Then it was just a matter of taking screenshots and measured taps to turn the phone into a very fine GSM modem/wi-fi router as I looked into getting another phone.
Rooting with a completely melted screen would be a little harder, but hey, maybe rooting could be done by following the instructions step-by-step with a little faith, and then post-root the USB might work with an external portable monitor? I'm sure it's a solvable problem.
are you running an EOL OS with an unpatchable kernel? phones have a lot of limitations as general purpose computers
Or buy used laptops with defects like broken screen or keyboard from FB marketplace.
Not in my area at least. People gut the RAM from them now to sell separately for profit, and often the HDD too for privacy, so you're basically buying a paper weight that's a motherboard in a shell.
There's laptops or X86 tablets with soldered RAM but those are rare and vanish immediately if they show up at a good price.
this is the way. samsung dex is pretty awesome to turn them into pseudo desktop computers.
Sure... but... the original $35 RasPi is closer to a modern RasPi Zero 1, which looks like it's selling for $45 - $50 on Amazon.
Modern top-of-the-line RasPis seem more like ARM PCs with fast, efficient multi-core CPUs and GigE. I bought a RasPi 500 at the beginning of the year just to see what it was like and it's my new "email and light web browsing" daily-driver. Though yeah, I probably wouldn't have paid $410 for it.
I bought my original RasPi mostly for the I/O. I wanted to blink some lights, drive some servos. And if I wanted to do that again, I would probably buy a Pico or Zero.
> Sure... but... the original $35 RasPi is closer to a modern RasPi Zero 1, which looks like it's selling for $45 - $50 on Amazon.
You want the Pi Zero 2 W, which is under $20 when it's in stock.
You also need to buy somewhere other than Amazon, which is where sellers go to unload their inventory at exorbitant prices between restocks.
Absolutely. Amazon isn't the go-to place to pick up electronics. I think I picked it because prices there are probably the highest you'll reasonably find for Pi stuff. Though they often have availability when everyone else is out of stock (likely because they have a bit more mark up than most everyone else.)
> Sure... but... the original $35 RasPi is closer to a modern RasPi Zero 1, which looks like it's selling for $45 - $50 on Amazon.
Yeah, because a second-hand 13-year-old computer is gonna last quite a long time.
A 13 year old computer is gonna use a lot more power than a RPi, that's for sure.
You would think... but if you don't have to run the 13 year old computer at full tilt, then the power difference may be minimal. The LEON SoS SPARC clones I used wound up consuming MUCH less power than modern intel cores.
And CPU power consumption is only part of the whole system. And a lot of the system power scales with bus speed rather than inverse CPU age. It's possible recent systems will consume more electrons than older systems.
I have a 60 year old computer attached to my Minuteman III and it's doing fine. A 13 year old computer that still works is a computer that still works. And if it's worked 13 years, then it might last another 13 years (unlike the Intel NUC that died after 18 months.)
If you need GPIO pins, ESP32 is good enough for lots of use cases. If you just need a small low-power PC, used enterprise thin clients and mini-pc's (google project tinyminimicro) offer more while still idling around 10W or less. Those can be still bought for like 40-100 USD with SSD and 8GB or more RAM included.
I think Raspberry Pi is worth it only for some niche use-cases with current prices.
Yeah, you can also combine and use both and still come out ahead.
ESP32 handles IO and streams data somewhere else that does any processing needed on more powerful hardware.
Unless you are space-constrained. Then something like RaspberryPi Compute Module is hard to replace.
Presumably the only customers buying Pis right now are companies who use them in their products. There are much better options on the used market for people needing small computers/servers.
> There are much better options on the used market for people needing small computers/servers.
Most people realized that the Raspberry Pi was never a great desktop or server replacement a long time ago.
It's an embedded system and it's best when used for embedded applications.
These are still purchased and used by hobbyists, but the people who were trying to use them as servers or desktops are not the target audience.
It's massively overpowered for most hobbyist embedded applications.
You know, a RPi 5 1GB is $77, 4GB is $109, 8GB is $170 and 16GB is $385. None of it makes sense, especially if anyone starts a reballing shop.
I was looking to try out Joel's TrueNAS on ARM this time with a Pi 5, a PoE and NVMe Hat ... I decided against it and ended up getting a good old cheap x86 compact NAS instead.
The pricing is off.
> You know, a RPi 5 1GB is $77, 4GB is $109, 8GB is $170 and 16GB is $385. None of it makes sense, especially if anyone starts a reballing shop.
Reballing the RAM of the Raspberry Pi is blocked by its firmware:
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2380887#p2380...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49786689
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
EDIT: See also https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/raspberry-pi-ram-lock... linked under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50429356
That's where the community always comes in handy. Those who can reball those many chips can flash some ROMs, change many things - no less.
Here's a handy post on how people are dealing with it.
https://hackaday.com/2026/09/22/raspberry-pi-ram-restriction...
How incredibly lame of them
The disruption to consumer electronics, both PCs and SBCs, will last for several years at minimum
I think we'll see prices crash within 12 months, because I don't think the data center bubble will last that long.
Same. Also because the margins are so high due to competition on the buyer side, bottlenecked by production which will continue to increase until there can be price competition on the producer side again.
I think we'll see prices crash within 12 months, because I don't think the data center bubble will last that long.
Market bubbles bursting doesn't lead to consumer price drops. The reduced demand from data centres will lead to a reduction in manufacturing rather a lower price.
That's cope. We might get a small dip, just like we saw in stocks. Inventing machine intelligence unlocks a lot of automation and innovation. Any data centers the labs and hyperscalers manage to get online the next few years will get filled by demand.
The first real problem machine intelligence companies could solve for their own good is how to avoid the current bottleneck in compute. Until then they are as subject to usual market behavior as any other kind of business out there.
> Inventing machine intelligence unlocks a lot of automation and innovation.
That a good point. Let's hope the RAM hoarding will eventually get us that and not bullshitting hallucination machines.
<eyes-shut-with-fingers-crossed-hoping-the-decimal-is-wrong-and-they-meant-bubble-will-pop-in-1.2-months> /s
I have a little Linux box that I've been trying to use more frequently instead of my MacBook. Partially just for fun, partially because I want to decouple a little bit from the Apple ecosystem.
I was having a ton of stability issues: my filesystem would randomly go read-only after a few minutes. After trawling through my system logs, Claude suggested that it was a memory issue. I ran MemTest86 and it bailed out after 10,000 errors.
So now I was very depressed because RAM prices are sky-high and I currently cannot justify spending ~$150---more than what I paid for when I got this box used off of Ebay mind you---to replace the RAM inside.
Then I remembered my wife had an old laptop she hasn't touched in years lying around. I popped it open and, lo and behold, the RAM was compatible! I felt very fortunate that I was able to do that. Thoughts and prayers for all the folks who need memory---I've felt the despair.
I have been buying and using Raspberry Pi 400 (Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 ARM v8 64-bit SoC running at 1.8 GHz, 4GB LPDDR4-3200 RAM) that goes from $50 to $39 (Microcenter yesterday). One can do a lot with this.
For everything else, either go lower level with ESP32 or higher level with a mini pc.
That's where we are right now.
About half a year ago, I bought a new Chuwi Minibook X with Intel N150 CPU, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for less than that. AFAIK, it's still available for about the same price, and it seems like a lot more value for the money.
Old lenovo mini computers unless you need something very lightweight.
ESP32 devices are still cheap enough but with a less-good ecosystems due to the Pi's popularity. I do plan on picking up a few Pi 2 Ws which are still selling at a MicroCenter near me for $18 with only three bucks of markup just for setting up a Pi-Hole and some other IoT project but yeah, looking at even the Chinese made boards like Raspberry Orange sees prices north of $70 which is just not worth it for something with this capability. At this point, why not just get a refurb'd thin client or mini-pc?
Esp32 is pretty damn powerful for the cost. We have one driving a display and keyboard, speaking and playing synthesize sounds through attached sound chip, driving an ADC over SPI at a high rate and talking Bluetooth to an attached device and talking wifi to the cloud. On a device that costs a few bucks.
You can buy them for very cheap on AliExpress. I spent more on a very cheap $6 soldering kit than on the ESP32 board I had to solder.
And it all started with $32. Also 16GB of RAM is a lot for RPi, IMO.
It started at $35/unit, in the United States at least. I've still got the invoice for my 256MB Model B...
$35 today gets you a 1GB Pi 4 Model B. For somebody who actually needs the form factor, it's pretty much a fine value.
For somebody who wants a server, it's always been a weird choice. (sorry Jeff :D )
For somebody who wants a desktop, the Raspberry Pi 500+ was a really fun choice when I bought mine in January. They cost twice as much today, which is sad. (although if anyone is feeling the desire and lives near a store, Microcenter has them on sale for $100 off...)
The entry level option is the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which is still $15
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w/
It also has twice the RAM of the original Raspberry Pi (at launch), plus WiFi, plus a lot of CPU power, and a powerful GPU, and a lot more.
I have a 16GB model and I use that much RAM for some specific development work on the Raspberry Pi platform, but now I wish they had never announced the 16GB model. It has created so many complaints from people who shouldn't and won't be buying it.
>which is still $15
Let alone has it been hard to acquire for 6mo+ now, it's out of stock until mid-2027. Of course, can find sales for $115+ on ebay.
It depends a lot on your use case. For headless stuff (automation that mostly uses the GPIO, for instance, or running a few "old school" server processes), you usually don't need that much RAM. However, when used as desktop computers, 8GB becomes the bare minimum to run a modern Web browser with a few tabs...
Someone said 640kB is enough for everyone.
Attaching 16 GB of precious RAM to that cheap weak SoC is, at this point, a waste of resources. The original idea was - cheap SoC + cheap RAM = cheap SBC. The SoC is still cheap and crappy but the RAM is now worth so much more. The pairing no longer makes any practical sense.
RPi Foundation decided who their customers were during and after the pandemic, no doubt thanks to years of community goodwill put into an increasingly uncompetitive product, especially so now. The good thing is the world moved on, there's tons of alternatives, and you really should look elsewhere and also past SBCs for anything with that much RAM.
I don't mean this with snark, but who did they land on? I have struggled to place the Pi for a long time because the range of things it can do is so broad, but then it gets limited by things like using an SD card for primary storage (which can fail). So while this could be a perfectly good home server, I wouldn't be able to rely on the boot drive. It also makes a really good first computer, but leaving it naked doesn't mean I can slot it in front of my kiddos and hope they'll be fine. I keep a Pi running attached to a monitor in my kitchen running a Home Assistant dashboard, and that's pretty good, but is that the sweet spot?
The Pi 5 (and 4?) can boot from external hard drives, including NVMe SSDs over PCIe. Granted, you're limited to PCIe 2.0 x1 (~1 Gb/s) or USB 3 (5 Gb/s), but the point still stands.
I bought this at launch and didn’t think much. It’s weird seeing price go up as much.
libre computer SBCs are totally affordable and better products
Why do you want Pi5 if you can get a smartphone with a screen?
Because a smartphone is locked down by default. I'm sure there's lots you can't just easily do with it.
The development experience of something like Android itself seems super unfriendly for beginners (as someone who is admittedly a beginner to it)
It's not as locked down as you might think. I was surprised how easy it was to root a couple of devices, one an old pixel and one a pretty new one
It's definitely a bit odd, the Android environment, but I didn't feel blocked on it. Also ended up unrooting one because termux and the built in debian VM on Android now give everything I need
Termux + X11+ XFCE is surprisingly nice on a vanilla phone
The Raspberry Pi is also somewhat locked down compared to most competing devices. But yeah phones are even more. :)
There is a lot of AI-aided effort going on "hacking" the bootloaders. Hopefully someone will figure out how to unlock them.
Do you think perhaps there are reasons other than using ... a smartphone?
Look, it's a misallocation of resources for you to own any RAM at all, and you should thank Sam Altman for letting you have some at any price.
It's impressive how evidently right he is in the context he spoke those words in and how pervasive the narrative twisting them has gotten.
This strategy is designed to protect their margins so nobody can self-host similarly capable models.
Unfortunately there is no appetite for governments to step in.
Is it a worse misallocation, I wonder, than doing what most people do with Raspberry Pis, which is leave it in a drawer ;-)
My 4 is, but only after a good while as my home server until I bumped up against the limitations of the hardware and upgraded to a proper server. So I suppose it did its job as a home lab gateway drug.
Yeah, currently I have a 3B, 2B and an original wifi-free zero in a drawer.
The 3B was my Octoprint server for the longest time while I was testing the 4B for a product, but for reasons I don't really understand, the 3B isn't quite punchy enough for Klipper, when it fully should be; it drops connections to the printer. I think any of them may continue to have some uses but perhaps not till I move to a new place.
Haven't gone for a 5B or Zero 2W yet, don't really need to. Rather more interested in what happens with the Picos these days.
Yeah, this is ridiculous - I am a long term Sailfosh OS user nad of course, when Jolla, the company behind it (of Nokia/Maemo/Meego fame) after fighting of at least 2 bankruptcies over the years finally releases new phone (they were selling SFOS licenses for Sony phones in the meantime) this insanity has to happen, forcing them to make their baby more expensive. :P
make a 128GB version and call it Raspberry Ai
What on earth are these SKUs even targeting? 16GB in a raspi is nuts.
You are one executive order [0] behind, and are legally required to call it the Raspberry Si
0: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inau...
that's a scam to move money from Anguilla (.AI) to Slovenia (.SI)
Unless they're part of the executive branch that order doesn't apply. (Which is kind of too bad, under the "if it actually works it gets a name and isn't AI anymore" rules we need a new name... but This Isn't It.)
The prices are crazy, but the uncertainty makes the choices even harder. I have my eyes on a Framework laptop 13 for some time. I was considering buying it with less RAM now, and then buying more RAM later. Now what I fear is: by the time RAM prices become reasonable, we might as well be using DDR7. So, even with a custom-built desktop PC or a Framework laptop it would be a pity to have to upgrade everything. On the other hand, it may well be our new reality, so maybe better buying in into 64GB RAM now? Not even sure if my reasoning is correct.
Guessing you don't actually need it and you're just thinking of getting it for fun? Because if you need one and you only need 32GB of ram today then you could just buy that for now and pay the cost of upgrading whatever the ram price is in the future if you need to. And if you last until the DDR7 days when ram prices finally go down then great, you saved by not getting the full 64 GB
Used laptops have always been a better value.
I don't understand? Should they be sold at a lower price when people are still willing to buy at the current higher price?
It isn’t even about people willing to buy at $X. The Pi foundation has to pay for RAM like everyone else.
No. They are greedy bastards:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/raspberry-pi-ram-lock...
The article you've linked makes no claim that it has anything to do with greed any everything to do with protecting the supply chain since there is currently a large monetary incentive for people to fuck with it.
They have been struggling for years to match supply with demand, and RAM arbitrage would undermine those efforts... and the market would be flooded with flaky boards remanufactured in the cheapest possible way.
I don't follow. Assuming they're not being greedy, why would ram arbitrage be profitable enough to undermine their efforts?
They have to plan their production in advance, with budgeting, contracts, and prices decided before the products are even manufactured. This is hard to do even when you're just trying to plan for the demands of legitimate buyers.
But every single day in the meantime, RAM prices will continue fluctuate, and arbitrage takes advantage of this. And arbitrate markets don't even necessarily track new RAM prices, if someone dumps a bunch of used LPDDR devices in China, people may harvest used memory for arbitrage.
For example, lets say they plan for how many people want to actually buy a 1GB Pi 5. Then they produce that amount. Then scalpers (hypothetically) realize they scape old RAM off discarded cable TV boxes for less than the OEM pays for new RAM. Then the legitimate 1GB Pis will be quickly scalped up off the market, and the market will be flooded with modified boards of higher capacities.
It says so right in the article. People were flooding the market with cheap/counterfeit/misconfigured Raspberry Pis and the organization was on the hook for support and dealing with angry customers.
I have not seen any evidence of "flooding". Just a couple posts about it. And one of those posts was saying theirs did work with the old firmware, so for that instance the Pi folks deserve the full blame for adding a check that disabled booting.
I also don't see any mention of it in this article?
The purpose of the Pi is affordable computing for learning. That's pointless if the system is very expensive.
People are going to have to learn to program with less RAM....
one could argue America is forcing China to learn how to program better via it's GPU sanctions.
Guffaw, as if people are "learning to program" anymore.
But the USA is definitely forcing Deepseek to learn how to write leaner code! Bring it on.
well, of course people are still "learning to program" it's just everyone gets to be sitting in the chair of an academic or the start up chair, or whatever.
Since they're still improving models, they still are learning how to program, it's just a meta game now, not the specific intricacies.
the original pi launched in 2012 for like $35 I think
the pi5 1GB model is now $45, so with inflation etc that's not too bad considering the feature set.
However, getting your hands on a 1GB model these days is practically impossible unless you go used.
Not really anymore, no.
The Foundation and the Trading Company have different goals, and the Foundation is not wedded to the Linux SBC Pi at all for this.
Physical computing education with Python is more than adequately served by the RP2040 and RP2350, and that is more or less where their focus is.
(Beyond that I think most of this is just geek whining, to be honest.)
a perfectly serviceable new rpi 3 is available for $39
So they should dissolve the organization because RAM is expensive?
It was their stated mission, yes.
'Our mission is to put high-performance, low-cost, general-purpose computing platforms in the hands of people and organisations all over the world,'
Hard to do that when you keep jacking the prices up.
It's a matter of RAM costs, rather than profit seeking, no?
As a 53 year old, I've been starting to feel like there's a very real chance I will never buy another brand new computer (for personal use), phone or gaming console in my lifetime, which would be very surprising if you told this to me ~2 years ago.
If my computer fails, I have plenty of old components from older systems that I can swap in. I also have quite a few old phones (my primary job over the past decade has been Android development, so I have older test devices that still function fine for my purposes). And consoles are just very optional (and way more costly than I am willing to pay) when they start costing $1500+.
Overall there are some positives from this, I'll be responsible for less e-waste. This is something I always tried to be cognizant of in the first place, but the economics will really force my hand even more.
Of course, things aren't all that great considering we got into this situation due to technology running in large datacenters running on lots of dirty power like methane turbines.
Lol, the “$35 SBC!” is gone, at this price, I would rather invest in jetson board or NUC.
It will stop when the data center bubble bursts. Right now a small group of companies are borrowing huge amounts of money to corner the market in compute in order to use it for AI. But there's no evidence that real AI revenue (as opposed to more borrowed money) will grow fast enough for them to pay for that debt, or that profit margins will be sufficient to make it worth it over the window they need to start recouping. When that realization hits the lenders and investors and the capital spigot shuts off, prices will crash. I think it will be very similar to a precious metals run-up.
I keep thinking that the AI gold rush is not an AI gold rush at all. It is a way to monopolize computing in 2 steps:
1) AI really does require a scaleup in compute power. In other words: you will be upgrading your hardware or use old software (at least if you want to run local or host your own saas)
2) the AI buildout means you can't buy the hardware, you can only rent it "in the cloud", because the AI buildout makes everything too expensive. Including memory, a nonnegotiable component of any computer or server
It only works, of course, if Amazon and Google and Meta and ... keep buying for another 2-3 years but that seems to be exactly what's happening.
Worst of all: monopolies used to at least require investment. But Amazon and Google aren't investing, really. They're still net profitable companies. It's almost insulting.
Classical monopoly (or duopoly) requires a moat. This is the moat they build. Everyone will just rent centralized intelligence - that's a promise to investors.
Yeah, but the key here is: the moat is not AI at all! The moat is they're buying all new computers (the key components). Every last one. So you can't buy one, you will be renting one, at seriously increased prices.
That's an interesting take. I had a similar thought about safety and how AI providers propagate that using cloud options is safer because hosting a server is open to attack vectors, and who would manage that best if not the big providers themselves.
The fact that Hugging Face was attacked not by a small amount of compute but such a vast amount of computation. It was only possible because its already so centralized by Open AI.
It feels a bit like cyberpunk where only the big companies in reality will have the resource to pull of such an attack.
Honestly if you told me two years ago where hardware prices are now I wouldn't believe you lol. It's insane. Even DDR3 RAM is going bonkers.
The thing with DDR3 RAM is as I understand it not really an "also". It's not that they are made differently it's just that the demand for "the best" RAM is so high that all production is going there. The DDR3 market isn't just as willing to pay such a markup.
Makes sense. I have a few old servers I still have running as CI runners, recently dished out more for 32gb of DDR3 than I did for equivalent DDR4 back in 2021. :(
Multiple theories have spawned regarding the usage, I strongly suspect that they are being used in drones for military purposes, hence the shortage at some point and the prices that are skyrocketing.
Actually, I am happy that mess has lead to people finally questioning if a calculator really needs a full browser backend and use 4GB.
I mean, sucks to be a buyer right now but as a developer I like where things are heading :( :)
Or even a WiFi stack (looking at you ESP32).
If you just want a computer, an Ayn Thor is +$90. It comes with 1TB of UFS 3.1 storage, not one but two fantastic OLED screens, nice joysticks, speakers, and it's much much much faster.
And it runs a fantastic CachyOS (a super tuned Arch) install, called ArmadaOS, https://armadaos.dev/
2026 has been pretty amazing, with the slow work upstreaming Qualcomm support really building. A bunch of really great chipsets have mainline support and actually work. The Thor is a bit behind SM8550, but SM8650 and SM8750 handhelds are also available (just a bit pricier, and non-dual screen yet).
Alas most phones don't have unlockable boot loaders. I'm anti-interested in the sad experience of Android, being unable to read my own files off my device. I really want to be able to read my chrome profile data, for reasons. Absolutely no go.
I'd much rather buy a 5 year old mini Dell (or Nuc or whatever) that I can reliably put Linux on than some kind of one-off thing like this.
Call me cynical after being burned countless times on niche-ass platforms. Even my Framework 13" has a flurry of issues I've never seen on more mainstream hardware. Life is too short to worry about bizarre firmware issues in hardware that no one is paid to support.
There's plenty of reason to be conservative and that's a solid recommendation. My own i5-8600t nuc continues to tick away!
I for one am delighted that you can buy a modern-ish high performance, advanced processing node based system, that's small, that has such incredible capabilities, that's super power efficient. And that finally it runs a mean Linux!
Speaking of, it's been a while since I've seen a jeff geerling submission on HN front page.
He has seemingly been doing a mostly second channel stuff lately. Those rarely make the front page as they are usually just "here is a thing I personally found interesting" projects.
You'll be told its the RAM price, but Amazon can deliver qty 1 of an equivalent speed ram (its technically slightly faster than DDR4 but much slower than DDR5) to my door tomorrow morning with sales tax for about $120. No one can explain why the other parts cost about $300. Note that "about $300" will buy you a 24 core Intel Ultra 7, the Amazon model is $350 because its unlocked for overclocking for those who don't think 24 cores at 3.7 GHz is fast enough. I'm sure the RasPi is much faster LOL.
You'll be told its the price of PCBs and chips, but again, the same company can deliver a box of three Xiao brand ESP32 dev boards to my door tomorrow morning for a hair over $20 including tax and shipping and handling.
You'll be told its a temporary supply chain disruption until you remember they've been pulling that scam for some years now, and as long as people fall for it and throw money at them, they'll keep pushing it.
The problem is they sold out to the hardcover textbook manufacturer business model. Take the head of the EE dept out for dinner and box seats at last night's sportsball game, suspiciously the EE department syllabus now says you need to buy it or else, and the seller says now that its a mandatory purchase "will pay anything for an education" in response they will charge "anything" which apparently is $385. See also Boomers and "will pay anything for medical care" well they know that and wait until you see the bill LOL. Also see real estate bubbles.
I don't see why they don't raise the price to that of an Apple Neo laptop. Its the same market and business model, pay what we ask or die uneducated and unemployed under a freeway overpass. Don't you want your kids to learn STEM and be successful? Well that'll be $385. Its the new "World Book Encyclopedia" scam.
Thankfully greedy Raspberry PI locked down memory upgrades, so nobody can save money by soldering off market chips.
2032
Raspberry Pi enshittified ages ago. If you want an SBC there are cheaper ones.