The trouble is that the RAM chip on the Pi is a high density module that's going to have come under pressure from the datacenter buildouts.
An 8 GiB DIMM for a desktop or server is using 8x 1 GiB chips or 16x 512 MiB chips (9/18 for ECC). An 8 GiB Pi uses a single 8 GiB chip. That's the same density as you would use for 128 GiB or larger sticks.
I bought a bunch of NUCs 18 months ago for some projects. They're no longer in use. A friend asked if I was selling any. I realized I might be able to sell them at cost or a profit. Crazy times.
There are generally lower-cost alternatives for sourcing the third-party products they carry. Their first-party products are usually more expensive, but they're of higher quality than the competition and come with better documentation and guides.
Both. Microcenter tends to sell Raspberry Pi hardware at MSRP, and occasionally on sale a couple bucks below MSRP.
Adafruit tends to be a bit more expensive. It's never bothered me since I like the company and its service, but I think pretty much anything you buy there ought to be purchased with the thought that you're prototyping and if you want to buy many parts for a final product, you'll eventually want to source parts somewhere else. (or, I assume, call Adafruit and try to negotiate a better price)
It's understandable enough why both companies are this way. Microcenter is a retail chain and can do things Adafruit cannot. (in truth, they are partners on some things, so it's more complicated than that - the point is that Microcenter is a much larger company)
I've never minded paying more at Adafruit to help support them. The support they have provided, with documentation, examples, libraries, etc. has been immensely valuable to my hobbies and work.
Nobody responsible or competent is scrapping DDR5 computers yet.
You can't use other speed standards of RAM in a computer designed for a faster (or slower) standard.
If it needs DDR5 it can't use DDR, DDR2, DDR3, or DDR4. I don't think I've ever seen any x86 machine that could use older slower standards.
You could use EDO in some FPRAM machines, and FPDRAM in EDO machines at a 15% speed penalty. You can use slightly faster DRAM in a machine that wants slower: later in their lives, I maxed out the RAM in some PowerMac G3 machines that wanted 66MHz DRAM using cheaper, already obsolete, 100MHz DRAM, or 133MHz DRAM in ones that only wanted 100MHz. But only within that standard.
It's an idea that has some merit. I still use old Thinkpads that need DDR3 as what would have been prohibitively expensive when they were new is now cheap -- I have maxed-out 16GB X220 and T420 machines, and a near-full W520 with 24GB.
But not DDR4, and you can't max out old DDR2 machines as big DDR2 DIMMs always were expensive and still are.
Intel has released CPUs that support multiple memory standards, but it's up to motherboard manufacturers to wire them up correctly and it's one or the other not both.
Boards with both slots on them have started to be released due to this current ram squeeze. e.g. ASRock's H610M COMBO board[0] has 4 DDR5 and 2 DDR4 slots
As someone who typically buys AMD chips, these combo boards have always been so cool to me. Intel boards are often so much better than AMD.
I got around the high RAM prices by purchasing a micro center bundle deal to upgrade from my 5600X3D to a 9850X3D.
The total price was $699 for the processor, 32GB DDR5 RAM, and motherboard.
I’m not even sure how they do it. They’re basically discounting the CPU by $200 and the board and RAM by $50 each.
One theory I have is that inventory has piled up at retailers like Micro Center as consumer sales have dropped off a cliff. Perhaps consumer demand has been hurt so much that micro center’s cost basis for the RAM is still pretty low; it’s old inventory.
RAM prices have gone up but micro centers can’t magically sell their consumer ram to data centers. They are stuck selling it to consumers. So maybe they’re only willing to discount the price below market rate if you buy more stuff from them and buy in-store only. If they sold it for the old price they’d see customers coming in just to flip the memory on eBay.
I know the consumer RAM and motherboard brands are hurting and it’s only the companies producing the underlying chips that are benefiting.
It's crazy how Raspberry Pi & Apple prices have moved in converging direction.
Pi 5 8GB is $200
MacBook Neo 8GB is $600 (probably some edu discount available)
Sure 3x the price, but it comes with - 256GB SSD, battery, display, keyboard, trackpad..
So the Pi has slowly become too expensive for weird one-off projects and also price competitive with a cheap Mac by the time you add all the stuff you need to use it as a cheap computer.
If Apple ever got around to a headless "Mac Micro", below the Mini, which had the same specs as the Neo in desktop form it would be even more stark. They could easily ship that for $400 (mini is $300 cheaper than cheapest M-series MacBook with same ram/ssd). They might never do this as it's enough computer for most people they'd lose revenue from those otherwise spending far more at the Apple Store.
Not a completely invalid or uncommon take, but also not completely correct. People lament that it isn't the $25 like it used to be with the Pi 2/3, but ignore that you can get a Pi Zero 2 W (quad A53 cores like 3B, 512MB RAM) for <$20. I've used them for a bunch of projects: moonlight game streaming client, on-stage video player controlled by a foot pedal, Bluetooth controlled recorder for USB audio interfaces, Tailscale exit node, etc. They are tiny and great!
Some people seem to think raspberry pi is a consumer tech company and whenever a new model is released, the old one will be discontinued. They will complain about the product being changed and the company robbing them of a cheap SBC.
I can only assume they don't actually work with the pi because if you spend just a minute looking at any reseller's inventory or even just the official website you will see they still make and sell and support boards from a decade ago.
I don't understand why it's so difficult for people to understand.
If you're using the Pi as a microcontroller that you can run Python on, then just get the cheapest Pi that meets your needs.
If you're using the Pi for computationally expensive tasks then pay more money and get the fast one.
Personally I have a Pi 5 and it's perfect for me because I want small size but high performance. People say "just buy a real computer" but that would be higher energy and larger footprint.
The whole point of these things is that you use them for whatever you can imagine. Since different people have different imaginations it only makes sense that there's a range of different devices to suit everyone.
Can a N100-class minipc” be installed inside of a wall with a touchscreen and serve as a PoE powered Home Assistant interface? Can it be used to build a portable battery powered smartphone like PC (Compute Module 5)?
Raspberry Pi’s biggest strength is its form factor and low power draw.
To drive a touchscreen and serve as a Home Assistant interface you need neither a Pi nor an N100-class mini PC. That's the job of an ESP32. 20 bucks... for a pack of 5.
(plus the screen. And ethernet / PoE variants are rare, and not as cheap, so if that's a hard requirement, maybe not for your specific use case)
Or! a "handheld gaming" device that runs mainline Linux.
Setting aside what they're for, Linux handheld gaming devices are kind of a perfect fit for a minor "house computer". Made cheap by commodification. Flexible. Sadly no GPIO in these I think but tack on an RP2350 and we're golden.
Strip or modify the chassis and embed them hidden or with the screen facing out. Kachinng.
True but that Raspberry Pi can be both the server and the interface if desired. It's also the easiest way to do all of this with RPis great software support and official plug and play accessories like RPi Touch Display 2. RPi is also going to be way more responsive rendering a complex Home Assistant dashboard.
I might also point out that with Pi/mini PC pricing being the way it is, a used iPad mini mounted to the wall is also in the same price range. As a bonus you could remove it from the wall and walk around with it, and you’ve got way less DIY work to deal with.
Well, nobody's arguing about RPi prices here. I'm just advocating for using the right tool for the job. Lots of people claim that Raspberry Pis have been rendered obsolete by cheap N100 mini PCs but they simply lack the understanding of what RPi actually is and what are its optimal use cases. Hosting a home server on a 16GB Raspberry Pi is mental illness territory and that's where an x86 mini PC is going to make way more sense. Same with retro gaming (unless you really need Composite out). RPis shine when you need compact size, low power and heat with great selection of hardware accessories like cameras and other sensors but also want to run full Linux or need that extra performance that a micro controller just doesn't have.
Edit: Putting a device with permanently attached battery inside of a wall or even on a mount, always plugged in gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Basically, my point is that for the use case of “touch screen on a wall,” you can grab something modest like a 4GB Raspbery Pi 5 for over $110 with no screen, power supply, enclosure, etc.
Or you look at a mini PC and you really can’t buy one at all for much less than $200 these days. Again, no screen.
But Apple will sell you a refurbished iPad mini for $379 and you’ve got nothing to setup.
I share your concern about running it with the battery all the time, but I think it’s pretty common. I probably wouldn’t put it in my wall but I know of a place of business I frequent often that has one plugged in 24/7 and nothing has happened.
Apple power manages devices that are plugged in all the time, they’ll likely just park the battery at 80%. They are also about as good as you can get as far as hardware quality: Apple sells a bazillion devices and has definitely thought of fire risk.
The other benefit of the iPad is that the accessory ecosystem is vast.
If I tried to put a mini PC where my Pi currently sits - a very narrow shelf - it would fall off and probably hurt itself. You can put a Pi just about anywhere.
For the microcontroller use case with Python, the alternative might be to use actual microcontroller that runs CircuitPython/MicroPython. Personally I find it a bit better due to no need to manage/update the Linux distro.
Everything on their website has a date they promise to manufacture them until.
They really want to assure people that they can get a near identical replacement for years to come if they want to build a product or deploy one somewhere.
Agree. It's clear since COVID that Pi it's barely a company for makers or DIYers anymore, but it's a supply company for small to medium industries to integrate cheap PCs in their manufacturing process and they are good at that role.
Huh. I had a work project a decade ago where we were evaluating SBCs as drivers for kiosks. At that time, the prevailing wisdom was that the Pi was specifically not for industry, as its main advantage was the strong community to provide support for DIYers. Competitors like PINE64 and Orange Pi were the same/better specs at half the price.
When people talk about whether something like a Pi is aimed at industrial customers, that is largely not a statement about the cost vs specs, nor about the level of engagement with the DIY community. It's usually about having a suitable supply chain and long-term support and stable BOM and a mature software platform for customers to start building on.
Our logic at the time was that the relatively fixed cost of figuring out the hardware and developing device-specific software was less than the variable cost-per-board delta of like $20.
The Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms weren't meant to power commercial-grade products, nor be cost effective at scale compared to raw/custom ARM and AVR devices. However, they've become ubiquitous in education, which I imagine has impacted industry. Similar to how software companies give out free student licenses so that upcoming engineers become familiar with their software for when they start working, an entire generation of embedded systems engineers were taught on official (or compatible) Arduino and Raspberry Pi devices. While these platforms aren't meant for commercial products, I imagine engineers in industry might use these platforms to prototype or work with subcomponents, before they integrate it with a raw/custom AVR or ARM platform. After all, when prototyping, it's easier and faster to get up and running when you have a massive collection of libraries and tutorials online to use, which RPi and Arduino offer, versus doing it all yourself with raw AVR and ARM.
Raspberry Compute Module (basically a normal raspberry without built-in I/O) is widely used in the industry at large. What they are not meant to be is the lowest cost per CPU/GPU flops so they are mostly used in high-value-add / low-volume / gen-1 products.
I personally worked on a system with raspberry compute modules 3 and 4, the total system cost was in the ~million dollar range. This was definitely a commercial product with dozens of engineers doing R&D, not a hobby project.
We were looking into smaller systems with lower profit margins (~20k USD) and for those we were considering moving away from raspberry CMs because of cost.
The main advantage of the raspberry CM ecosystem is just how widely popular it is and how cheap and available "dev boards" are (just grab a non-CM raspberry and it is almost the same thing). Most of these types of systems don't really have the I/O that makes testing and developing a lot easier.
Being popular is quite important because firmware issues are notoriously expensive to troubleshoot and fix often requiring the manufacturer help. Said manufacturer does not give a damn if you are a low-volume customer. More popular systems have more information available online and are less likely to have bugs (or at least the bugs are known).
I remember one of our other systems bluetooth module had a weird edgecase bug that caused the module to shutdown after several days of it being powered on. It took multiple engineers >1month of work to basically go "yep nothing we can do about this and manufacturer is not helping"
I know they are being used in Ukranian drones and some police-car systems in some cities (although this was hearsay from a coworker and I don't remember the city). But those are just the examples I heard of.
As an example, I believe the tear-down of one of the now-defunct electric scooter rental company’s units revealed it contained a RPi. IIRC, the commentary lambasted them for using it, because it’s not really rated for that kind of job. But a significant portion of the peanut gallery understood and rationalized the decision. I expect fewer folks would question this choice these days.
We have a lot of old pi3 stock at $work. We keep using them. The pi3 was the newest model when we imagined and built the applications we're using them for. It was perfectly capable back then. Why would that have changed? The application hasn't changed and it's still perfectly capable now.
So a 61% price hike over 5 years, of which 24% was just inflation. If the total price really went up 200% in your country, that's exceptional and probably caused by policies unique to your country.
btw you can't compare prices without shipping because there was never an option to buy 100 at $15 each and amortize shipping. Retailers treated it as a loss leader with a limit of one per purchase, often forcing you to buy some extra junk to meet the order minimum.
Yeah, for those with a Micro Center, the Pi pricing is in line with MSRPs. A lot of people buy from vendors on Amazon or eBay, which do not have to stick to MSRPs, and they use those prices as "gospel". Sadly, for some people, those prices are the best they can find for a shipped product in their location, so I don't blame them.
Can you buy out their inventory, sell them for $36 online, and help everyone save a dollar, or is this the same old "Retailers treated it as a loss leader"?
Amazon/eBay prices are indeed gospel. You can ship something like this across the country for <$5 so location doesn't matter unless you're talking tariffs
I'm sure Microcenter is not selling Pi Zeroes at a loss. They're an authorized retailer selling at the part's MSRP. They do sometimes make these available only in store, not online, once they sell out online and I don't think it's a mystery why a retail business would do that.
Why are you so confident? Raspberry Pi's prospectus says "unit gross profit margin of 20 per cent. for us and 10 per cent. for our ARs" and they give an example: "sell it to our ARs for $90, which in turn would sell it to the end user for $100". AR=Approved Resellers and delivery costs are paid by the reseller.
Is 10%/$1.50 enough to pay for the retailer's freight, ~3% fee to accept credit cards, inventory carrying, rent, payroll, shrinkage, support/RMA, and fraud?
The Pi Zero 2W is great, but data I/O (WiFi, USB, and micro SD) do limit use cases slightly. For most use cases, I doubt this is an issue, but it is something to keep in mind if you want to run bandwidth-constrained services on it. For $15, I don't think that's an issue, but it is unfortunate.
I've easily played 1080p video, but not using a full Linux GUI. The more effective way is to use a command-line video player like mpv that can leverage the hardware decoder and render to the frame buffer.
I made a project for a band to use on-stage where it would switch between videos by tapping a bluetooth foot pedal. The stompbox-style foot pedal buttons were just wired into an ESP32 acting like a bluetooth keyboard sending 1, 2, or 3. The key bindings for mpv were setup to instantly switch to specific videos for each number. It worked perfectly.
I have also used it to real-time 1080p stream my gaming PC from another room using Moonlight so that I could play in more than one location in my home. That was also running directly from the command-line.
But trying to use something like X/Wayland and proper GUI apps usually performs poorly. 512MB of RAM and the 1GHz CPU clock struggle with that.
> Is it at all possible to run 1080p video using Pi Zero 2 W smoothly with no jittering?
Yes, I think so. With strong caveats.
I used a Pi 3b as the primary video player for local media in my living room for a few years, starting a decade or so ago when that was the new hotness. The Pi Zero 2W is the same thing except with less IO and a somewhat-slower clock speed (but it can be overclocked to match the 3b).
I just put an appropriate build of Kodi on an SD card, booted it up like an appliance, pointed it at my network share, and used it.
The performance was proper for the time doing this in lets-sit-down-and-watch-a-movie mode. It was generally flawless with 1080p h.264 and lesser formats. It was not so good with h.265/HEVC, but that wasn't as common back then as it is today.
I was very pleased when I picked up a Pi 4 for this role once that came 'round. It does a very fine job with all of my 1080p media on my old dumb TV, including h.265 (which it has a hardware decoder for).
> What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site?
No, not in my experience. There may be an incantation that I don't know, but I have not had very good success with these devices with browser-based streaming media. They have, for me, been resolutely disappointing in this role. I blame gaps in the video driver/X11/browser stack, but I haven't ever wanted to go very deep into this particular rabbit hole.
> I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-disconnected TV.
If you're in the States and you can tolerate the ecosystem (which is definitely not browser-based), then you might find that a $25 ONN streaming box from Wal-Mart is a better bet for this job. These run Android.
> If you're in the States and you can tolerate the ecosystem (which is definitely not browser-based), then you might find that a $25 ONN streaming box from Wal-Mart is a better bet for this job. These run Android.
These are horrible from a privacy standpoint, and should be avoided. They are cheap for a reason.
In my experience, yes to hardware-accelerated video from CLI--running in EGL mode, with no window manager, that RPi model works very well. (A C++ app that uses video as a texture can be surprisingly performant, too.) But no to playing video in a full desktop environment and browser, not smoothly--it's just too much overhead.
No, I don't think it will be beefy enough, since you need to be running a desktop environment essentially to do that. (Check out Plasma Bigscreen BTW.)
Still 25+ available for me, in Columbus, Ohio. In-store only, limit 1 per household.
I'd pick one up when I'm in the area this weekend...but I'm not into the scalping/arbitrage game, and I've already got a few Pi Zero Ws kicking around without a purpose that are still overkill for lots of things. (I may have bought too many of those back when Microcenter was selling them for half of MSRP at $5.)
Assume the numbers are correct, Pi spent $100 for a PCB with some components; Neo's hardware includes keyboard, 13 inch display, aluminum chassis, battery, charger. You remove the costs of the above from that $500.
I was recently looking for an upgrade for my aging HA Green, and I had an 8GB RPi5 with a m.2 hat, case and PSU selected, but when I checked prices I could get an 8GB Zimaboard 2 that includes 32GB eMMC for $10 more than the RPi, and that gets me a n150 processor, 2x2.5Gbit networking, 2 SATA ports and a PCIe expansion port. It idles at 5-7W.
So yeah, the RPi5 has gotten prohibitively expensive, at least to the point where a chinesium mini pc is cheaper, has better performance, and about the same power consumption.
Having had a subscription to Hack-a-Day for a long time, I firmly believe that the vast majority of "weird one-off" Raspberry Pi projects don't actually need anything as capable as a Raspberry Pi SBC. It's just a matter of brand recognition and familiarity. If it gets too expensive, I suspect that more users will migrate to microcontrollers than to gutted notebooks.
You don't even need to learn anything new, I'm sure you can ask Claude to vibe code something on RP2350 nowadays and there's an 80% chance it will work.
I built a portable meshtastic terminal using Claude and a Pico 2. It's written 100% of the code in MicroPython and it works great. It even wrote the driver for the E-ink screen I'm using. I built a jig to hold a webcam and the e-ink screen, then had Claude write a script/MCP that takes a photo and crops just the screen out. Then I asked it to figure out a driver, and after a 20 minute loop of taking photos and updating it's driver, it was done.
Another Hackaday reader here. I think that the RPi shines in projects where GPIO are needed, yet the developer needs a full Linux OS (usually to run Python).
I agree that vibe coding microcontrollers will increase the use of embedded systems instead of RPi devices. Seems like a good move for them to have built the RPi Pico.
There’s something really fun about writing your own microcontroller code as a software engineer that hasn’t worked with embedded before. At least for me.
Before you just vibe code, consider if it piques your interest. You might just enjoy learning, playing, and building with something new.
I saw a talk about a year back with them arguing that things like N150 platforms are probably a better choice than Pi based machines.
Came down to, wide software support with x86, higher performance, UEFI, secure boot and storage standards like NVME slots. It was a fair argument but doesn't apply to everyone.
I dunno, it's not unexpected. Smartphone hardware has been cheaper, more proliferate and faster than Raspberry Pis for a while. The Pi Foundation finds a market by supporting Linux, documenting GPIO and Arduino/hat ecosystems, and advocating for a hackier, server-like approach with the cheap hardware. Game consoles, smartphones and consumer laptops are often powerful, but priced taking the customer's service revenue into account.
My Raspberry Pi is definitely outclassed by a few of my old phones and laptops. But it's also super pleasant to host services on, so it's my go-to SBC.
If I could install PostmarketOS (and a close-to-mainline kernel?) on one of my old smartphones, I'd rather use that for my cyberdeck project than a Pi. I'm not prepared to do a pmos bring-up on an unsupported phone, though.
Apple could bridge the gap between Mac Mini Pro and HomePod Mini for the Neo to try experimental local AI configs in need of more memory and storage. The Vision Neo completes the three part environment system for students in biology or morphogenesis and robot design.
Raspberries are basically for DIY projects. I have one on my router handling call blocking for my landline. If it was costing $300 I would rather get a mini PC or use one of my defunct phones with UserLand on it. I can't see any world where a comparison to an entry level laptop makes sense.
with that new cheaporino macbook running on the same chip, i imagine it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to install and boot it on tv hardware.
Agree, I just meant on the pricing. I like the rpi, have hads lots of fun with the rpi4 making a custom home media player. Just at this price point not sure it makes much sense for as many people to play around with.
I use two rpi4 with a touchscreen and some relays connected to gpio to control my lights, speakers, heater, and with some USB-powered speakers I have internet radio (usable also as alarm) and I can see when the bus comes and set timers for cooking. Since the USB-powered speakers emit noise when not in use, I power down the USB port entirely when they are not in use. I use openbox to start my software and have a couple of python daemons to control the relays and decide what to turn on and off. Also they don't have a battery so I'm not in need to keep an eye on something that might explode.
PI's are expensive. But they have a very stable and well developed software eco system and are really flexible.
I still buy them. And a lot of them. Because with a Raspberry Pi 5 I'm able to make amazing wildlife camera sysetems that use thermal imaging and local AI to make an extremely effective solar powered wolf detector. I have a system in the field that's been running continuously since September 29 2025, over 8 months autonomously. It also records full frame thermal video in h264 24/7 and I can remotely retrieve images and video. That's a lot of functionality on a Pi 5.
I've collected over 60 videos of wolves from just one site with a Raspberry Pi 5 in this manner. In Belgium... Which is not exactly the biggest hot spot for wolves.
I developed my own one out of very high quality modules from China and added the software to the Pi so all of the driver software is developed in the Netherlands from our company. Note this was no small matter. It's a product now. But currently we sell them on a project mode till we get all the scalability in place to sell them as boxed units.
Plus the run the pi in secure boot mode with encrypted drives, precisely so we can sell them as a product without loosing all our IP that goes into this. Another nice things about the Pi 5 as a platform as it's possible to do this.
The modules originally come from the company behind guideIR. Personally I think they are the best thermal sensors available. They have amazing onboard image processing so that the living things really popout in the image, you can see this in the videos.
We have photos in the banner for the website. The modules are tiny but we 3D print rain shielding enclosures for them.
The modules draw just 1W of power, so they are great for our wildlife camera systems. And of course, they get images day and night. And we use thermal image motion detection to trigger the local AI inference. Normal PIR triggered wildlife systems can only triggrer on largish animals quite close by (Check out the wild boar video from this morning, you could never detect this with a traditional wildlife camera that uses PIR sensors https://youtu.be/rmav8IjWxeo). We can detect animals easy in the 50-100m range and with 24/7 thermal recording we can go back in time, invaluable for behavioral research.
I'm pretty sure we have the only wildlife camera system with thermal modules in high resolutions. All thanks to the Pi 5.
(Actually, we also run this with an ultra low light visible camera, also recording 24/7. With audio in both thermal and visible stream. Running on the same platform). Videos also online with the other videos.
How are you getting the thermal sensors out of china without running into the export/import restrictions on dual-use tech? Without correct import licensing I've been limited to 9fps and other restrictions (if I want to do it legally).
I have a good relationship with our supplier and they apply for all necessary legal requirements.
What country are you from ? There’s a list of countries that we can ship to (Only whole systems as that’s our product). 640 resolution requires export licenses for us to countries outside of the EU. We apply for those for our customers. You will need to supply end user statements and identify who you are.
The modules we ship have 25 fps frame rate.
The UK is in the list of countries we can ship to. It is outside of the EU so we would need to apply for an export license for you.
384x288 resolution does not require an export license for us to ship to the UK. But it does require an end user statement.
However, if the UK also requires an import license, then I have no advice for you here. Interesting to know though, as it would complicate exporting to there.
I really struggle to see where this fits in to most use cases. The appeal of the Pi back in the first iterations was being a relatively cheap linux computer with GPIO.
I have decided that the Pi4 1GB is the ideal for hobbyists. Faster than Pi3, takes normal USB-C charging, and can do most single server or electronics jobs. Which is why it is currently sold out.
I agree...
I use a Pi4B 8GB as a home server with a number of duties.
Less power consumption than the Pi 5 (and no heatsink), and it was the first to offer the combination of USB booting, more than 1GB RAM, and Gigabit Ethernet. And reasonably priced in 2019.
I really wish they made a new Zero that doesn't use ddr2 ram to ensure that it can still be made far into the future. As far as I'm aware, nobody is making ddr2 anymore
The original vision IIRC was to provide a cheap computer for students in low-income families. You could plug into your TV at home and start learning.
Then the hobby community got wind of it and proceeded to buy out all the stock on every release (myself included, I still have one of every first 3 versions sitting in my cabinet)
At this stage I think the way to realize this "cheap computer" vision is in unlocking smartphones. Either with an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone, or with an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS.
"an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone": https://postmarketos.org/
"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.
There is an unbelievable amount of e waste created because OEMs locked the software down and stopped updating it. I have an android tablet which is functionally working but effectively useless.
The 80s kid in me still thinks dropping someone into a linux shell with a bunch of tools and no internet access is the best learning environment. Kids these days with their fancy tiktoks and such need to summon the old ways.
The 80s kid me lived in a small town with no access to technical manuals or people who could help. The developer manuals for $80 each or a compuserve account to get access to the source code examples of the manufacturer were completely out of reach. What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
> What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
Probably nothing. That free info also comes with YouTube and TikTok and every TV show and movie and game on demand. You have to be very disciplined to focus on difficult topics in a sea of easier and more gratifying entertainment.
The concept of a cheap new computer like an RPi for poor families is a 1st world solution that doesn't understand markets. Used computers are way more popular in countries where the price of new computers are out of reach.
In 2014 I bought a used RM desktop PC for my parents for £50 from eBay, which came with the tower, keyboard, mouse and all cables. I had an old monitor laying around, but again, easy to pick up if needed. They still use it today.
RPis get sold more to the businesses and startups that started with them in 2010s, rather than hobbyists now.
If you cannot negotiate a good deal with the big industrial silicon manufacturers but you want good up-to-date kernels, RPis are a perfect option.
There are SoMs or SBCs with other CPUs like NXP or MediaTek that has more or less mainline support. However, they ask more money. The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel issues that the CPU and the board manufacturer missed.
There are also lots of cheaper SoMs if you're not allergic to Chinese chipsets, and the cheaper ones tend to have PoP on-package DDR so you can spin your own 4-layer PCB without having to pull your hair out impedance matching DDR3+ traces. That, of course, if you can fit into ~64MB RAM.
> The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel
NXP/i.MX are way better at mainline kernel than Broadcom that RPi is based on, come on.. and they have cheaper options like i.MX 9 series. Other vendors, yes, mainline support could be pretty spotty.
You should really look at the Pi Zero 2 W. Similar capabilities to the 3B for <$20. The Pico 2 is also cheap and very capable if you don't actually need Linux. Most projects don't need a Pi 5.
Yeah that's why I have so many ESP32-S3's around, no project I've done actually needs Linux and the boot times and SD card problems that come with using a Pi.
The value and capabilities of ESP32s are incredible. Most projects I see that use Linux to drive a GPIO would be better served by an ESP32 almost every time. They can even be coded using Arduino, and LLMs can produce Arduino code easily. The boot instantly, consume extremely little power, and are so small they make even a PI Zero look like a giant brick.
It's useful if you need GPIO but not $350 useful. Nowadays you can get used office mini PCs with a 10th gen Intel and 16GB RAM for like $200 and they'll come with an SSD. No idea why anyone would buy an expensive Pi.
And GPIO support for your used office equipment is often just a cheap USB adapter away too, GPIO support is not some Pi exclusive thing, even if its 40 pin layout is widely used now etc.
Sure, but none of the hardware peripherals routed out to those pins are exclusive to that pin header.
If you need a few i2c or SPI or uart buses or even just general purpose IO then AliExpress has a gazillion little USB based modules that will get you exactly that.
If you're still very new to electronics and not at all comfortable going outside of well-established curriculum that explicitly says use this raspberry pi with this sensor attached on these pins with this library configured in this way... Yes. But that can't be most of the people paying this price?
What are you wanting to use it for? There is using Pi as desktop, which was only option for a while, but now mini PCs are much better. There is using it as server, where mini PCs are better for homelabs and multiple services but Pi is good for lightweight single service. Then there is hobbyist use, where Pi is cheap when get lightweight one and has ecosystem of hardware and software.
This effect plays around again and again. Someone makes something for the public good, and corporations show up and take advantage of it. Basically the story of FOSS too, when you think about it.
The Raspberry Pi 5 uses LPDDR4X. Finding 16GB (128Gb with a small b) chips in this size is not common. That memory chip is at least $200, probably more, even at the scale that they’re buying them.
I’m glad they’re making it available for the rare cases where it’s needed, but for PR purposes it would have been better if they just discontinued the 16GB model until RAM prices came down. I’m getting tired of hearing “Raspberry Pi 5 costs $300” now from people who have no reason to buy the 16GB version.
The 1GB version works well for simple Linux shell work and embedded projects. It’s $50.
The 4GB version works well for GUI work. Let’s be real: It’s a slow device and not a desktop/laptop alternative in 2026, so 4GB goes a long way for the use cases where you want to do basic GUI work. $110 for the 4GB model (if you shop not at Adafruit)
EDIT: Adafruit prices are higher for some reason. 16GB Pi 5 is $305 on other sites.
So strange. I can probably sell my 4GB Pi 5 for about 40% more than I bought it for... 3 years ago. This isn't how computers are supposed to work, let alone Pis.
I get what's happening, but it's strange to see it happening.
Actually, could I sell it for ~10% less than someone would buy it new? Is there a market for used Pis? Maybe 30%, I don't know. That I can sell it for what I got it for at all is wild.
It is strange, but it's not any stranger than any other time of relative scarcity.
We just aren't making enough stuff to keep up with demand.
This kind of thing has happened before.
Some computer-oriented highlights from the memory hole: An epoxy plant burned in 1993 that had supplied ~60% of that stuff for semiconductor packaging which caused widespread issues, there were aspects of RAM shortages in middle 90s (mostly because Windows adoption increased demand), we had Thailand floods that screwed up hard drive production, we had the crypto boom affecting GPUs in a big way from ~2016 to ~2022. There were covid-era chip shortages (which had been rationally predicted years before the covid scramble) while the Chia crypto bubble also ate up storage devices around that time.
It sucks for consumers (read: buyers) when this stuff happens, but it's been pretty normal for a really long time.
The current shortage is due to hugely-increased demand in the datacenter space and that's a new problem, but it's just one in a long list of problems that had been new when they surfaced. :)
---
Anyway, yeah: When prices are high, it becomes time to go through the pile of hardware and sell some stuff.
Future humans realized AI was the only way to beat the aliens and sent a message to the past with instructions to invent crypto so that the infrastructure would be ready for the majority of timelines.
I thought anyone serious about mining switched to ASICs and custom hardware a while ago. At least for BTC and maybe eth, a custom asic setup is ~2-3x more profitable
BTC has been an ASIC game for a very long time. GPUs haven't been profitable there since the ASICs showed up a dozen or so years ago (with odd exceptions where power is "free").
Eth kept hitting the GPU market hard until ~4 years ago, when the network switched from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. That cut the home-gamer hobbyist miners out rather completely.
(That last one kind of sucked for me. When my office-room had resistive heating, I rather liked getting paid for my otherwise-idle GPU to make heat for me in the winter time. It wasn't much, but >0 is more than <0.)
Ethereum switched to proof of stake in 2022. The cryptocurrency inflicted GPU shortage began in 2017. You're talking about an event that is basically a decade ago at this point.
This isn't exactly news, that model has been at $350 for a while.
It's not like RPi suddenly introduced a 16GB model at a ridiculous price due to having forgotten about low cost stuff. The 16GB model was originally $85 iirc. Then the memory shortage hit. They could either withdraw the 16GB model (maybe screwing over some people who absolutely had to have it) or raise the price for those with urgent enough requirements. They did the latter.
Me, I'd like to see some large MCU's (let's say a little above RP2350 / ESP32 level) with a few MB of memory, but with memory protection, like old fashioned Vaxes with that much memory. That would allow running multiprocessing OS's where the processes couldn't easily clobber each other like on the current stuff. Many programs don't require GB's of ram.
I don't think they can withdraw a model easily, they also supply Pis to industrial markets and they probably have contracts that guarantee supply for a given time period.
16GB was $120 at launch. Even at that price it was a stretch and really only useful in some niches. The 4 or 8 GB models were always the best value. Now those are a bit too much, for what you get.
I still think there are good applications for the <4 GB Pi 5s, but for a lot of projects I just stick with a Pi 4 or CM4 now.
Ah ok, $120, then $85 may have been the 8GB version. I remember being annoyed that to get the NVMe slot in the 500, I would have had to buy the 500+ with 16GB of ram and the mechanical keyboard, neither of which I wanted. It was at the time around $200 while an 8GB regular 500 was maybe half that.
It looks like a pi 5 is $10 more than a pi 4 in most (all?) sizes. Seems worth it for the NVMe slot by itself. SD cards are awful. I'm not buying until the ram situation settles though. I have a 400 (4gb pi 4 in a keyboard) that I use for some things.
My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops that I got from BYU Surplus and added some RAM (before RAM price went totally bananas) and SSDs to.
I spent less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.
I later added a large machine that I used to use as a Linux desktop, with a GPU and 64GB RAM, which I use for generating OpenStreetMap tiles.
> My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops
I used to do this as well and this is fine if you're able to source cheap power. But I'm in the UK, electricity prices are insane and I can't afford to run this kind of setup any more.
it's not unmanageable to do if you have plentiful and cheap access to area that can see the sun. My 'vintage' computing collection got a lot bigger when I switched to solar.
> less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.
Before RAM went crazy, the Pi 4 was $75 for *8GB and $125 for 16GB.
Another consideration is heat and power consumption, I have an OptiPlex micro (also surplus) and power consumption is 8W-90W (standby versus peak), 5x-10x more than a Pi 4.
Similar here. I lucked out, a charity in the UK (Bernados) has an ebay account and they had a huge joblot of about 200 brand new DELL Optiplex 3050 Micros (i7 6700T, 16GB DDR4, 1tb SSDs).
I picked up 4, at £50 each, and when they arrived they were still sealed, and included a power supply, keyboard, mouse and windows 11 license (which never got used).
Makes the pi look like a terrible deal given you've also gotta buy power supply, a hdmi adapter for their moronic decision to use mini hdmi, etc
It has definitely been a crazy few months for prices.
On 2025-12-18 I bought a RPi 5 kit on Amazon from CanaKit that consisted of an 8 GB Pi 5 with the official RPi 5 256 GB SSD, case, fan, 45W power supply, and some cables which came fully assembled.
It was $209.99.
Today it is $339.97.
On 2025-09-02 I bought a Samsung 1 TB EVO Plus M.2 SSD along with along with a Sabrent USB-C M.2/SATA enclosure to use with my RPi 4.
It was $64.99 for the SSD and $22.75 for the enclosure.
Today the SSD is $255.00 (down a little from the $261.08 it reached last month) and the enclosure is $29.95.
BTW, if you are looking for an RPi it looks like you can't rely on the prices shown on rpilocator.com.
Right now for example it lists RPi 5 8 GB in stock in the US for $80 (Digi-Key), $175 (Pishop), and $200 (Adafruit). Similar for 4 GB ($60, $110, $130 at those three sellers, in the same order). Same pattern for RPi 4. 8 GB from the same three sellers in the same order: $75, $165, $190. 4 GB $55, $100, $120.
Clicking the links reveals all the Digi-Key entries are wrong. Their actual price is the same as Pishop (whose rpilocator.com entries seem to be correct).
I can get a (used) fanless laptop and a USB GPIO/I2C/SPI/CAN/whatever adapter for that money. Raspberry Pis started at ~$30 for a minimal configuration. They were so cheap that they killed the whole overpriced range of $100 to $200 dev boards by vendors that tried to make money of dev boards for their chips.
They have to be cheap enough that tinkers leave them in their projects.
You might be surprised how small a laptop motherboard can be. Once you take away screen, keyboard, battery, speakers, daughter boards and all that, you can have an actively cooled motherboard as slim as a pi and not much bigger.
If you need something really tiny, an esp32 can do a lot of what we used to use a pi for. Driving an eink display for example
I’ve used Pi’s quite a bit and probably could have used something else for a lot of applications. When the Pi Pico came out that was an absolute dream for a lot more projects but still lacked the amount of RAM and Flash memory for some projects. Recently I came across the Waveshare ESP32-P4-Module Basic Kit that has 16MB of Flash and 8MB of PSRAM. The board comes in a Pi form factor with the 40 header and MIPI connections for camera and LCD. I’ve been able to port a Linux app by using the ESP IDF port of FreeRTOS and Vuejs/Tailwind for a web UI. The ESP32 P4 has dual core 360/400MHz RISC 5 with a Ethernet port. Waveshare added the C6 to the SOM if you want WiFi. That device is now my go to for anything that used to be done on a Pi. For a lot of other things the ESP32 S3 with the slower flash and PSRAM is the lowest cost that you can find.
This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
I first checked for Mac Minis and interestingly they are much closer to $650 for similar specs.
And obviously if Intel is fine for your use case, either the N100 type of mini PC or, my preference, an off-lease HP, Dell, or Lenovo USFF PC, would be like half that for a very capable machine.
> This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
That "laptop" will also absolutely smoke the Pi on performance, too:
MacBook Neo for $600 is the only laptop under $999 worth looking at nowadays. Apple used to be the expensive premium option and they’re basically the cheapest today. What a time to be alive.
Even if you're an Apple fan, surely you don't believe that the Neo obsoletes the Air. The $500-$1,000 price segment has been alive and kicking since well before the Neo.
1) Apple had long term contracts for memory which will run out. Afterwards it will be very interesting to see what they do.
2) RPi uses older memory that is much much more expensive to buy in the market as manufacturers have dedicated capacity to newer formats used by AI boxes for KV caches
These perform way better and have similar efficiency, too. Case, power supply, cooling, and storage are all included too. If you don't need GPIO then you don't need a Raspberry Pi. If you do then consider using a microcontroller (Pi Pico, ESP32, etc.) first.
Not really the Pi's fault - really it's AI causing the massive increase in HW prices (notably RAM in this case) that has really destroyed the market for the Pi's.
Same thing happening for servers, gaming PC's, cell phones, so on.
I really don't know who this is targeted at. As a development board these are extremely expensive and as a mini computer you're far better off with something N100 based or similar.
Ecosystem bought in does not require you to buy the latest and most expensive board.
The Pi 1 model B+ was released in 2014. They still make and support it today and will keep doing it until at least 2030. You can just buy that instead. They are not apple.
Unfortunately Radxa and Milk-V are almost completely out of stock and not much cheaper. If you need more than a microcontroller there's no circumventing the memory shortage at this point.
Kicking myself for not buying the Q6A at the beginning of the year (I wanted three and arace would only sell one per customer, but one would've been better than none).
Similar situation, one thing I like the with the Pis design is you can throw PoE hats on them and build a whole home infrastructure system where the only thing that needs battery backup for power cuts is the main ethernet switch - all of the essential services, switches and wifi APs are powered downstream by their ethernet ports over PoE.
Makes making your key network services (VPN, firewall, DNS, NTP, home assistant etc) on battery backup very easy, as just one plug to the primary switch to keep powered, and my wifi/internet stays on when the power cuts.
I could use other devices, but 5 pis with PoE hats rack mount very cleanly in a single 1U row and passively cooled with no fan noise etc.
Raspberries are cool for tinkering with hardware, learning how to write kernel drivers etc. But I think this is how maybe 30% of Raspberries are used. People do uncanny things to turn those boards into something we already have on the market - mini PCs, and thin clients. For my home server, I replaced Raspberry Pi with a used HP T630 I bought for the quarter of the Pi's price, and that was a good decision.
Frequently used argument against mini PCs is lack of GPIO. There are adapters based on FT2232H. The drivers are lame or non-existent, though, so I wrote one by myself, so the chip appears in system as native GPIO port which makes it easier to use with various programs. "itachilab/ftdi-gpio" if someone is interested.
And the 8GB one is $200. For 70$ more you get the Jetson Orin Nano with comparable single core speed but with two more cores, LPDDR5 with 5x as much memory bandwidth, more IO, and an entire GPU.
I wonder so much what their initial capacity was (which ought to go up marginally, and what their expected capacity curves look like.
I would not expect them to dump cheap ram. That is a false hope. The world needs volume, massively more volume, and it feels like everyone else is going to take a sizable fraction of a decade to even start responding. Maybe perhaps possibly CXMT can scale fast, but they have many multiples to grow before they are more than a drop in the bucket.
It's also unclear when if they too will want to start stacking 12 then 16 then 24 rams atop each other, to sell chips that cost what multiples of what GPUs used to.
They won't, no one will. Too much investment for too much of a risk of the bubble popping and yet another run of the boom-bust cycle that left the world with not even a handful of RAM makers in the first place.
The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer with native support for UART, SPI, I2C, CSI, and more. There's a large ecosystem of HATs, sensors, and peripherals built specifically for it. Most mini PCs rely on USB for peripherals, which isn't ideal for embedded use cases. Additionally, mini PCs tend to be discontinued within 2–3 years, whereas the Pi has much longer lifecycle over a decade. It's closer to an ARM development board, and those alternatives aren't cheap.
There are plenty of Pi clone boards at lower prices, but they have smaller communities and less documentation. When you hit an unexpected problem, it can be hard to find solutions or get support.
I don't think I have any beef with what you're pointing out - I was only saying that I don't think the Radxa products' pricing are demonstrating anything too shocking about the Rpi products' pricing.
I personally would probably choose one of those over a Rpi (but would probably still rather buy more off-lease Elitedesk G6 Minis, which is what I use for 'lil computer' projects)
> I was only saying that I don't think the Radxa products' pricing are demonstrating anything too shocking about the Rpi products' pricing.
I agree it's not too shocking, I think prices have increased everywhere including competitors.
> off-lease Elitedesk G6 Minis
Those are great if you can surface them!
I've also been enjoying the N100 mini-ITX boards from ASROCK[1] and ASUS. Great choice if you already have a power supply and some RAM stockpiled. The ASUS one uses SODIMM. They use very little power.
Dram prices and Flash prices are inflated right now, but the pi were never focused on Desktop users. As a platform it no longer makes sense for many use cases. =3
What are they used for?
Its CPU's PassMark scores an average of 4,246.
A quick check on AMZN: https://www.amazon.com/KAMRUI-Mini-PC-i3-10110U-Bluetooth/dp... uses AMD Ryzen 4300U (scores 7364), 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, supports 3 4k (maybe 30HZ) monitors at the same time. That mini pc cost $289.
Every time I see entitled people crying because of the prices of a Rasperry Py I remember my first computer that had hundred of megahertz's speed and megabytes of RAM.
I could do very useful things with that machine. So it is not the end of the world if we have to go back to a world when you merely have thousands of times more memory for 4 times less money.
It could even be positive if it forces people to be more efficient writing code and wasting less resources.
This is really sad. Me and my girlfriend at the time watched all of our movies off of a Pi 1 and a USB hard drive when it came out. Those days are long gone.
Imagine having a business relying on the Pi boards!
It’s worth adding Pi4@1GB still costs $35 but any other memory configurations (and Pi5) go for much more now.
Well, there are a lot of products being made and sold using Raspberry Pi. I have seen people use it to make interactive content on screens at escape rooms, and use it as a computer for digital signage that shows the same content on a loop.
6 months ago, I also started experimenting with Raspberry Pi, and now I am working on a Chromecast alternative for businesses called Soljacast using RPi. My device can work as digital signage, or a casting device for co-workings and event companies that use computers at events for presentations.
I am also using it to build a personal companion AI device with a screen, sort of like an Amazon Echo Show but with Microsoft's Clippy in there. So I am sure people are building even more complex stuff than me.
Consider that entire product lines for random widgets you see in every day life in the dozens or hundreds have Pis inside now. A lot of "smart" things are just the thing plus a Compute Module.
There are smart parking garage lights, smart inspection cameras, smart golf ball dispensers... all these things have enough margin they can absorb a 100-300% component increase, though I'm sure they don't like it.
off the top of my head: ip kvms, keyboards, 3d printers, home assistant, cameras, zwave or zigbee. Their moat is superb software support and established ecosystem. I think their most challenging competition would be ESP32s or mini pcs. Source: my ahh
I’m surprised to see those legacy USB ports on a board where space savings is important. Do they do it for backwards compatibility with older cases and housings?
And am I correct to see that the USB-C only does power? How do you connect your pheripherals to this board?
I think legacy USB peripherals are very common. Almost all of my peripherals are legacy USB; I think I only own a single USB-C peripheral. Old stuff still works, so I don't need to buy new ones.
Interesting. I don’t own any legacy USB equipment anymore, everything is USB-C now. I started phasing out my old equipment ten years ago and everything from the past five years has had USB-C as standard. Even my shaver chargers over USB-C.
I guess that the people who use $350 boards also mainly use USB-C. Unless you want to connect old hardware to it but I don’t see that use-case.
Not being able to connect my devices to this board is a blocker for me.
A person who can justify spending $350 on an SBC can probably manage to shake enough change out of the sofa to buy an adapter to plug their widgets into it.
But, sure: It's definitely even cheaper than that to just sit back and complain about it.
Understandable but I would have preferred a couple of fully functional USB-C ports and then have people use dongles for using old hardware on this board. Similar to using a serial adapter.
That is now illegal in the European Union. Everything sold is required to have USB-C.
> From 28 December 2024, the rules apply to mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, headsets, videogame consoles, portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems and earbuds sold in the EU. From 28 April 2026, they will also apply to laptops.
Got it. I guess some people still use wired mice and keyboards with legacy connectors. But how many of those use them on a $350 board? Seems like a very small use case. I personally use Bluetooth for that, been doing that for the past 20 years.
You insist on calling it legacy connectors, but they are just perfectly good current day connectors to connect a keyboard, a video game controller, a USB drive, a printer, a scanner or the Bluetooth dongle for your Bluetooth mouse. I think only Apple decided that it was deprecated for them because it did not allow them to make their laptops thin enough to their taste. Meanwhile the rest of the world is perfectly fine with it for many use cases. You might also not believe it, but I also still use HDMI cables for screens, like a caveman ;)
A Lenovo x280 i5 8th gen with 16gb Ram 256gb ssd cost less than that and run faster with screen and keyboard. You can dual boot Linux and Windows. You can also install OpenClaw or Hermes. Plenty of x280 or L14 in secondhand market. I don't see the point of buying Pi5. Unless you are collector of Pi stuff.
Pi even before these ram prices was getting expensive and kind of missing the point from my perspective. Definitely good to have them releasing new models.
What bothers me is that now you need cooling for some models, and obviously price is getting too high.
On the other hand... $50 for 1Gb version is excellent still. And you should be able to use it just fine.
I think people commentating here are missing the point. The cost of that pi is for the 16 GB of RAM. Which in fairness, is a lot of RAM for a device of that type.
You can still buy a Raspberry Pi on a budget if you don’t need that much memory. For example, the 2 GB model is $75.
because Apple goes in and buys out entire production cycles based on anticipated demand. Most infamously they got a year worth of TSMCs last new node - no one else could have it.
Usually, that gamble pays off, sometimes it does not (cough Apple Vision), and in some cases they get so many QC rejects that they can make an entire new product line on (financially) worthless scrap, that's how the MacBook Neo came to be - a bunch of iPhone SoC's that failed binning, I think in GPU cores.
Before the personal LLM craze you could easily get $400 Mac Minis from Apple's certified refurbished store. I bought two M2 Pros for that price and turned them into Asahi Linux CI machines.
Cheapest mac mini I could spec out on the apple store right now is about $750, which if you consider how much more capable its M4 processor is than the pi, is a pretty good deal tbh.
Including but not limited to dual gigabit Ethernet (on a PCIe bus), NVMe slots, and a capable power supply is included in the box.
I lucked out having bought a few N95 mini PCs a few years ago. They were even cheaper then with 16GB of RAM out of the box. To me they're vastly superior to the various RPis I replaced.
I sold off my Pi 4s and never bothered with the 5s. I kept my mix of older Pis for projects that need GPIO and of those my Pi Zeros are the ones that really get used.
They’re not equivalent devices in almost any dimension. I got a pizza at the grocery store for $6. It has no bearing on raspberry pi being a joke or not.
Agree, but their prices are still bad.. I use Rpi vs. Rockchip/Allwinner, etc. on commercial products. Rpi software is a bit better but after the chip shortage their prices have been artificially inflated..
Some folks might have missed that memory prices on the whole are up [1] 90% since Q4.
The memory used by the Pi 5 is up 700% [2]!
Raspberry Pi are working the issue by releasing new memory variants that are cheaper[2].
Edit: You can still walk into a Microcenter and get Pi 5 16GB for US $289!
1. https://au.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
2. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/a-new-3gb-raspberry-pi-4-fo...
The trouble is that the RAM chip on the Pi is a high density module that's going to have come under pressure from the datacenter buildouts.
An 8 GiB DIMM for a desktop or server is using 8x 1 GiB chips or 16x 512 MiB chips (9/18 for ECC). An 8 GiB Pi uses a single 8 GiB chip. That's the same density as you would use for 128 GiB or larger sticks.
> An 8 GiB Pi uses a single 8 GiB chip. That's the same density as you would use for 128 GiB or larger sticks.
Thank you for the explanation.
I wish PIs used SODIMMs. I'm sure there's a reason they don't involving address and data lines, but I wish they used cheap, commodity RAM.
Microcenter doubled the price of the 500+ kit shortly after I bought one. Still $90 cheaper than Adafruit, unsurprisingly.
I bought a bunch of NUCs 18 months ago for some projects. They're no longer in use. A friend asked if I was selling any. I realized I might be able to sell them at cost or a profit. Crazy times.
There are generally lower-cost alternatives for sourcing the third-party products they carry. Their first-party products are usually more expensive, but they're of higher quality than the competition and come with better documentation and guides.
Both. Microcenter tends to sell Raspberry Pi hardware at MSRP, and occasionally on sale a couple bucks below MSRP.
Adafruit tends to be a bit more expensive. It's never bothered me since I like the company and its service, but I think pretty much anything you buy there ought to be purchased with the thought that you're prototyping and if you want to buy many parts for a final product, you'll eventually want to source parts somewhere else. (or, I assume, call Adafruit and try to negotiate a better price)
It's understandable enough why both companies are this way. Microcenter is a retail chain and can do things Adafruit cannot. (in truth, they are partners on some things, so it's more complicated than that - the point is that Microcenter is a much larger company)
Adafruit is mostly on the expensive side.
I've never minded paying more at Adafruit to help support them. The support they have provided, with documentation, examples, libraries, etc. has been immensely valuable to my hobbies and work.
You'd have to imagine that the 500+ Kit's cost of goods is impacted twice, first on memory and again on solid state storage.
I wonder if it be possible for pi to support cheap older generation of RAM modules? And thus use recycled RAM from old computers from scrap?
Nobody responsible or competent is scrapping DDR5 computers yet.
You can't use other speed standards of RAM in a computer designed for a faster (or slower) standard.
If it needs DDR5 it can't use DDR, DDR2, DDR3, or DDR4. I don't think I've ever seen any x86 machine that could use older slower standards.
You could use EDO in some FPRAM machines, and FPDRAM in EDO machines at a 15% speed penalty. You can use slightly faster DRAM in a machine that wants slower: later in their lives, I maxed out the RAM in some PowerMac G3 machines that wanted 66MHz DRAM using cheaper, already obsolete, 100MHz DRAM, or 133MHz DRAM in ones that only wanted 100MHz. But only within that standard.
It's an idea that has some merit. I still use old Thinkpads that need DDR3 as what would have been prohibitively expensive when they were new is now cheap -- I have maxed-out 16GB X220 and T420 machines, and a near-full W520 with 24GB.
But not DDR4, and you can't max out old DDR2 machines as big DDR2 DIMMs always were expensive and still are.
Intel has released CPUs that support multiple memory standards, but it's up to motherboard manufacturers to wire them up correctly and it's one or the other not both.
Boards with both slots on them have started to be released due to this current ram squeeze. e.g. ASRock's H610M COMBO board[0] has 4 DDR5 and 2 DDR4 slots
[0]: https://asrock.com/MB/Intel/H610M%20COMBO/index.vn.asp#Overv...
As someone who typically buys AMD chips, these combo boards have always been so cool to me. Intel boards are often so much better than AMD.
I got around the high RAM prices by purchasing a micro center bundle deal to upgrade from my 5600X3D to a 9850X3D.
The total price was $699 for the processor, 32GB DDR5 RAM, and motherboard.
I’m not even sure how they do it. They’re basically discounting the CPU by $200 and the board and RAM by $50 each.
One theory I have is that inventory has piled up at retailers like Micro Center as consumer sales have dropped off a cliff. Perhaps consumer demand has been hurt so much that micro center’s cost basis for the RAM is still pretty low; it’s old inventory.
RAM prices have gone up but micro centers can’t magically sell their consumer ram to data centers. They are stuck selling it to consumers. So maybe they’re only willing to discount the price below market rate if you buy more stuff from them and buy in-store only. If they sold it for the old price they’d see customers coming in just to flip the memory on eBay.
I know the consumer RAM and motherboard brands are hurting and it’s only the companies producing the underlying chips that are benefiting.
Here is a link for Microcenter @ 289.99 USD: https://www.microcenter.com/product/702590/raspberry-pi-5?rd...
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>Raspberry Pi are working the issue by releasing new memory variants that are cheaper[2]
Raspberry Pi are working on the issue but letting you spend the same amount of money per GB, for fewer GB.
It's crazy how Raspberry Pi & Apple prices have moved in converging direction.
Pi 5 8GB is $200
MacBook Neo 8GB is $600 (probably some edu discount available) Sure 3x the price, but it comes with - 256GB SSD, battery, display, keyboard, trackpad..
So the Pi has slowly become too expensive for weird one-off projects and also price competitive with a cheap Mac by the time you add all the stuff you need to use it as a cheap computer.
If Apple ever got around to a headless "Mac Micro", below the Mini, which had the same specs as the Neo in desktop form it would be even more stark. They could easily ship that for $400 (mini is $300 cheaper than cheapest M-series MacBook with same ram/ssd). They might never do this as it's enough computer for most people they'd lose revenue from those otherwise spending far more at the Apple Store.
Not a completely invalid or uncommon take, but also not completely correct. People lament that it isn't the $25 like it used to be with the Pi 2/3, but ignore that you can get a Pi Zero 2 W (quad A53 cores like 3B, 512MB RAM) for <$20. I've used them for a bunch of projects: moonlight game streaming client, on-stage video player controlled by a foot pedal, Bluetooth controlled recorder for USB audio interfaces, Tailscale exit node, etc. They are tiny and great!
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w/
I wish a Pi 5 (and RAM in general) was cheaper, but Raspberry Pi can't control that.
Some people seem to think raspberry pi is a consumer tech company and whenever a new model is released, the old one will be discontinued. They will complain about the product being changed and the company robbing them of a cheap SBC.
I can only assume they don't actually work with the pi because if you spend just a minute looking at any reseller's inventory or even just the official website you will see they still make and sell and support boards from a decade ago.
I don't understand why it's so difficult for people to understand.
If you're using the Pi as a microcontroller that you can run Python on, then just get the cheapest Pi that meets your needs.
If you're using the Pi for computationally expensive tasks then pay more money and get the fast one.
Personally I have a Pi 5 and it's perfect for me because I want small size but high performance. People say "just buy a real computer" but that would be higher energy and larger footprint.
The whole point of these things is that you use them for whatever you can imagine. Since different people have different imaginations it only makes sense that there's a range of different devices to suit everyone.
N100-class minipcs are better at everything the pi 5 is doing except perhaps a bit of idle power and gpio.
Can a N100-class minipc” be installed inside of a wall with a touchscreen and serve as a PoE powered Home Assistant interface? Can it be used to build a portable battery powered smartphone like PC (Compute Module 5)?
Raspberry Pi’s biggest strength is its form factor and low power draw.
To drive a touchscreen and serve as a Home Assistant interface you need neither a Pi nor an N100-class mini PC. That's the job of an ESP32. 20 bucks... for a pack of 5.
(plus the screen. And ethernet / PoE variants are rare, and not as cheap, so if that's a hard requirement, maybe not for your specific use case)
Or! a "handheld gaming" device that runs mainline Linux.
Setting aside what they're for, Linux handheld gaming devices are kind of a perfect fit for a minor "house computer". Made cheap by commodification. Flexible. Sadly no GPIO in these I think but tack on an RP2350 and we're golden.
Strip or modify the chassis and embed them hidden or with the screen facing out. Kachinng.
True but that Raspberry Pi can be both the server and the interface if desired. It's also the easiest way to do all of this with RPis great software support and official plug and play accessories like RPi Touch Display 2. RPi is also going to be way more responsive rendering a complex Home Assistant dashboard.
> Can a N100-class minipc” be installed inside of a wall with a touchscreen and serve as a PoE powered Home Assistant interface?
Yes. Generally only requiring a $10 PoE splitter like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134500605396
Some N100 class machines draw more power, but many don't, and there are more capable PoE splitters for a few dollars extra.
Use a USB touchscreen.
I might also point out that with Pi/mini PC pricing being the way it is, a used iPad mini mounted to the wall is also in the same price range. As a bonus you could remove it from the wall and walk around with it, and you’ve got way less DIY work to deal with.
Well, nobody's arguing about RPi prices here. I'm just advocating for using the right tool for the job. Lots of people claim that Raspberry Pis have been rendered obsolete by cheap N100 mini PCs but they simply lack the understanding of what RPi actually is and what are its optimal use cases. Hosting a home server on a 16GB Raspberry Pi is mental illness territory and that's where an x86 mini PC is going to make way more sense. Same with retro gaming (unless you really need Composite out). RPis shine when you need compact size, low power and heat with great selection of hardware accessories like cameras and other sensors but also want to run full Linux or need that extra performance that a micro controller just doesn't have.
Edit: Putting a device with permanently attached battery inside of a wall or even on a mount, always plugged in gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Basically, my point is that for the use case of “touch screen on a wall,” you can grab something modest like a 4GB Raspbery Pi 5 for over $110 with no screen, power supply, enclosure, etc.
Or you look at a mini PC and you really can’t buy one at all for much less than $200 these days. Again, no screen.
But Apple will sell you a refurbished iPad mini for $379 and you’ve got nothing to setup.
I share your concern about running it with the battery all the time, but I think it’s pretty common. I probably wouldn’t put it in my wall but I know of a place of business I frequent often that has one plugged in 24/7 and nothing has happened.
Apple power manages devices that are plugged in all the time, they’ll likely just park the battery at 80%. They are also about as good as you can get as far as hardware quality: Apple sells a bazillion devices and has definitely thought of fire risk.
The other benefit of the iPad is that the accessory ecosystem is vast.
But that's way bigger and hotter than a RPi4 with an official Touch Display 2. It's technically possible but sounds silly and impractical.
Watermelons are better at everything the apples are doing except perhaps a bit of weight and for making apple pies.
If I tried to put a mini PC where my Pi currently sits - a very narrow shelf - it would fall off and probably hurt itself. You can put a Pi just about anywhere.
For the microcontroller use case with Python, the alternative might be to use actual microcontroller that runs CircuitPython/MicroPython. Personally I find it a bit better due to no need to manage/update the Linux distro.
Everything on their website has a date they promise to manufacture them until.
They really want to assure people that they can get a near identical replacement for years to come if they want to build a product or deploy one somewhere.
Agree. It's clear since COVID that Pi it's barely a company for makers or DIYers anymore, but it's a supply company for small to medium industries to integrate cheap PCs in their manufacturing process and they are good at that role.
Huh. I had a work project a decade ago where we were evaluating SBCs as drivers for kiosks. At that time, the prevailing wisdom was that the Pi was specifically not for industry, as its main advantage was the strong community to provide support for DIYers. Competitors like PINE64 and Orange Pi were the same/better specs at half the price.
When people talk about whether something like a Pi is aimed at industrial customers, that is largely not a statement about the cost vs specs, nor about the level of engagement with the DIY community. It's usually about having a suitable supply chain and long-term support and stable BOM and a mature software platform for customers to start building on.
Our logic at the time was that the relatively fixed cost of figuring out the hardware and developing device-specific software was less than the variable cost-per-board delta of like $20.
The Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms weren't meant to power commercial-grade products, nor be cost effective at scale compared to raw/custom ARM and AVR devices. However, they've become ubiquitous in education, which I imagine has impacted industry. Similar to how software companies give out free student licenses so that upcoming engineers become familiar with their software for when they start working, an entire generation of embedded systems engineers were taught on official (or compatible) Arduino and Raspberry Pi devices. While these platforms aren't meant for commercial products, I imagine engineers in industry might use these platforms to prototype or work with subcomponents, before they integrate it with a raw/custom AVR or ARM platform. After all, when prototyping, it's easier and faster to get up and running when you have a massive collection of libraries and tutorials online to use, which RPi and Arduino offer, versus doing it all yourself with raw AVR and ARM.
Raspberry Compute Module (basically a normal raspberry without built-in I/O) is widely used in the industry at large. What they are not meant to be is the lowest cost per CPU/GPU flops so they are mostly used in high-value-add / low-volume / gen-1 products.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia...
I personally worked on a system with raspberry compute modules 3 and 4, the total system cost was in the ~million dollar range. This was definitely a commercial product with dozens of engineers doing R&D, not a hobby project.
We were looking into smaller systems with lower profit margins (~20k USD) and for those we were considering moving away from raspberry CMs because of cost.
The main advantage of the raspberry CM ecosystem is just how widely popular it is and how cheap and available "dev boards" are (just grab a non-CM raspberry and it is almost the same thing). Most of these types of systems don't really have the I/O that makes testing and developing a lot easier.
Being popular is quite important because firmware issues are notoriously expensive to troubleshoot and fix often requiring the manufacturer help. Said manufacturer does not give a damn if you are a low-volume customer. More popular systems have more information available online and are less likely to have bugs (or at least the bugs are known).
I remember one of our other systems bluetooth module had a weird edgecase bug that caused the module to shutdown after several days of it being powered on. It took multiple engineers >1month of work to basically go "yep nothing we can do about this and manufacturer is not helping"
I know they are being used in Ukranian drones and some police-car systems in some cities (although this was hearsay from a coworker and I don't remember the city). But those are just the examples I heard of.
As an example, I believe the tear-down of one of the now-defunct electric scooter rental company’s units revealed it contained a RPi. IIRC, the commentary lambasted them for using it, because it’s not really rated for that kind of job. But a significant portion of the peanut gallery understood and rationalized the decision. I expect fewer folks would question this choice these days.
While you can still buy a pi 3, you'd be kicking yourself for not using something faster.
We have a lot of old pi3 stock at $work. We keep using them. The pi3 was the newest model when we imagined and built the applications we're using them for. It was perfectly capable back then. Why would that have changed? The application hasn't changed and it's still perfectly capable now.
Why would you? It's completely fine for it's intended educational context
It's not just intended exclusively or limited to education. Many products ship with compute modules inside.
I don't know, I've got a ~10 year old 1B+ sitting there running Pihole just fine. My ass remains un-kicked.
> you can get a Pi Zero 2 W (quad A53 cores like 3B, 512MB RAM) for <$20
Except... You can't. They're sold out almost entirely and none of the distributors can tell when the new batch gets in. At least in EU.
Try getting your hands on a Pi Zero 2 W. Here in Germany you cannot get them at all any more and the quoted price has gone up 3x.
It's $37 new incl shipping on US eBay. Initial retail price was $23 incl shipping, see launch thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025579
So a 61% price hike over 5 years, of which 24% was just inflation. If the total price really went up 200% in your country, that's exceptional and probably caused by policies unique to your country.
btw you can't compare prices without shipping because there was never an option to buy 100 at $15 each and amortize shipping. Retailers treated it as a loss leader with a limit of one per purchase, often forcing you to buy some extra junk to meet the order minimum.
Weird. I can get one at the local Microcenter - with headers, the only one they're selling right now - for $18. They have a bunch in stock.
Yeah, for those with a Micro Center, the Pi pricing is in line with MSRPs. A lot of people buy from vendors on Amazon or eBay, which do not have to stick to MSRPs, and they use those prices as "gospel". Sadly, for some people, those prices are the best they can find for a shipped product in their location, so I don't blame them.
Can you buy out their inventory, sell them for $36 online, and help everyone save a dollar, or is this the same old "Retailers treated it as a loss leader"?
Amazon/eBay prices are indeed gospel. You can ship something like this across the country for <$5 so location doesn't matter unless you're talking tariffs
I'm sure Microcenter is not selling Pi Zeroes at a loss. They're an authorized retailer selling at the part's MSRP. They do sometimes make these available only in store, not online, once they sell out online and I don't think it's a mystery why a retail business would do that.
Why are you so confident? Raspberry Pi's prospectus says "unit gross profit margin of 20 per cent. for us and 10 per cent. for our ARs" and they give an example: "sell it to our ARs for $90, which in turn would sell it to the end user for $100". AR=Approved Resellers and delivery costs are paid by the reseller.
Is 10%/$1.50 enough to pay for the retailer's freight, ~3% fee to accept credit cards, inventory carrying, rent, payroll, shrinkage, support/RMA, and fraud?
https://data.fca.org.uk/artefacts/NSM/Portal/NI-000098822/NI...
Those are both extraordinarily low profit margins. Good on them!
Yeah, more stock arriving on 1st of October, so I'm told.
The Pi Zero 2W is great, but data I/O (WiFi, USB, and micro SD) do limit use cases slightly. For most use cases, I doubt this is an issue, but it is something to keep in mind if you want to run bandwidth-constrained services on it. For $15, I don't think that's an issue, but it is unfortunate.
Is it at all possible to run 1080p video using Pi Zero 2 W smoothly with no jittering?
What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site?
I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-disconnected TV.
I've easily played 1080p video, but not using a full Linux GUI. The more effective way is to use a command-line video player like mpv that can leverage the hardware decoder and render to the frame buffer.
I made a project for a band to use on-stage where it would switch between videos by tapping a bluetooth foot pedal. The stompbox-style foot pedal buttons were just wired into an ESP32 acting like a bluetooth keyboard sending 1, 2, or 3. The key bindings for mpv were setup to instantly switch to specific videos for each number. It worked perfectly.
I have also used it to real-time 1080p stream my gaming PC from another room using Moonlight so that I could play in more than one location in my home. That was also running directly from the command-line.
But trying to use something like X/Wayland and proper GUI apps usually performs poorly. 512MB of RAM and the 1GHz CPU clock struggle with that.
> Is it at all possible to run 1080p video using Pi Zero 2 W smoothly with no jittering?
Yes, I think so. With strong caveats.
I used a Pi 3b as the primary video player for local media in my living room for a few years, starting a decade or so ago when that was the new hotness. The Pi Zero 2W is the same thing except with less IO and a somewhat-slower clock speed (but it can be overclocked to match the 3b).
I just put an appropriate build of Kodi on an SD card, booted it up like an appliance, pointed it at my network share, and used it.
The performance was proper for the time doing this in lets-sit-down-and-watch-a-movie mode. It was generally flawless with 1080p h.264 and lesser formats. It was not so good with h.265/HEVC, but that wasn't as common back then as it is today.
I was very pleased when I picked up a Pi 4 for this role once that came 'round. It does a very fine job with all of my 1080p media on my old dumb TV, including h.265 (which it has a hardware decoder for).
> What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site?
No, not in my experience. There may be an incantation that I don't know, but I have not had very good success with these devices with browser-based streaming media. They have, for me, been resolutely disappointing in this role. I blame gaps in the video driver/X11/browser stack, but I haven't ever wanted to go very deep into this particular rabbit hole.
> I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-disconnected TV.
If you're in the States and you can tolerate the ecosystem (which is definitely not browser-based), then you might find that a $25 ONN streaming box from Wal-Mart is a better bet for this job. These run Android.
> If you're in the States and you can tolerate the ecosystem (which is definitely not browser-based), then you might find that a $25 ONN streaming box from Wal-Mart is a better bet for this job. These run Android.
These are horrible from a privacy standpoint, and should be avoided. They are cheap for a reason.
Yeah, probably. So is the Android phone that I bought for $64 that I take with me everywhere.
My war is already lost. Reaping the spoils of assimilation is only natural.
In my experience, yes to hardware-accelerated video from CLI--running in EGL mode, with no window manager, that RPi model works very well. (A C++ app that uses video as a texture can be surprisingly performant, too.) But no to playing video in a full desktop environment and browser, not smoothly--it's just too much overhead.
No, I don't think it will be beefy enough, since you need to be running a desktop environment essentially to do that. (Check out Plasma Bigscreen BTW.)
I used thin client seems much better for this.
An old thin client machine, like a Thinkcentre M73, would do the job, and would cost less than an RPi. Look at EBay.
He's talking about a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It's a $15 part.
Zeros are just sold out everywhere through, no?
I can't find a Pi Zero 2 W for sale anywhere that will deliver to me
except you can't. They have been out of stock for weeks
I just checked my closest Microcenters (in Illinois.) 12 in Westmont and 25+ in Chicago (for $18) Zero W were 13 and 25+ respectively at $15.
Long gone are the days when they would sell a Pi Zero for $3.14 on Pi day.
Pi Zero 2 W is what people are saying is out of stock. MC doesn’t have any of them either.
There's more than one Pi Zero 2 W -- one with headers, and one without. Are you looking at both?
Headerless version is out-of-stock for my nearest Microcenter (Columbus, Ohio): https://www.microcenter.com/product/643085/raspberry-pi-zero...
But they say they have 25+ of the version that comes with headers: https://www.microcenter.com/product/683270/raspberry-pi-rasp...
Second link says sold out.
Still 25+ available for me, in Columbus, Ohio. In-store only, limit 1 per household.
I'd pick one up when I'm in the area this weekend...but I'm not into the scalping/arbitrage game, and I've already got a few Pi Zero Ws kicking around without a purpose that are still overkill for lots of things. (I may have bought too many of those back when Microcenter was selling them for half of MSRP at $5.)
8GB of LPDDR memory is around $100 in volume.
That leaves $100 for everything else on the Pi, including the hardware, building it, transporting it, and retailer margin.
That leaves $500 for everything else on the MacBook Neo.
That's why you can get so much more from the MacBook Neo. There's 5X as much budget for everything other than RAM.
I'm wondering how "everything just costs twice for exactly the same thing because it's Apple" factors into the equation.
Assume the numbers are correct, Pi spent $100 for a PCB with some components; Neo's hardware includes keyboard, 13 inch display, aluminum chassis, battery, charger. You remove the costs of the above from that $500.
I was recently looking for an upgrade for my aging HA Green, and I had an 8GB RPi5 with a m.2 hat, case and PSU selected, but when I checked prices I could get an 8GB Zimaboard 2 that includes 32GB eMMC for $10 more than the RPi, and that gets me a n150 processor, 2x2.5Gbit networking, 2 SATA ports and a PCIe expansion port. It idles at 5-7W.
So yeah, the RPi5 has gotten prohibitively expensive, at least to the point where a chinesium mini pc is cheaper, has better performance, and about the same power consumption.
And the n150 supports AVX2: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241636/...
Why were you looking for a replacement/upgrade? Is your HA Green failing, or is it just too slow?
Asking as someone who is considering purchasing one (just to run HA on it, obviously).
Having had a subscription to Hack-a-Day for a long time, I firmly believe that the vast majority of "weird one-off" Raspberry Pi projects don't actually need anything as capable as a Raspberry Pi SBC. It's just a matter of brand recognition and familiarity. If it gets too expensive, I suspect that more users will migrate to microcontrollers than to gutted notebooks.
You don't even need to learn anything new, I'm sure you can ask Claude to vibe code something on RP2350 nowadays and there's an 80% chance it will work.
I built a portable meshtastic terminal using Claude and a Pico 2. It's written 100% of the code in MicroPython and it works great. It even wrote the driver for the E-ink screen I'm using. I built a jig to hold a webcam and the e-ink screen, then had Claude write a script/MCP that takes a photo and crops just the screen out. Then I asked it to figure out a driver, and after a 20 minute loop of taking photos and updating it's driver, it was done.
Another Hackaday reader here. I think that the RPi shines in projects where GPIO are needed, yet the developer needs a full Linux OS (usually to run Python).
I agree that vibe coding microcontrollers will increase the use of embedded systems instead of RPi devices. Seems like a good move for them to have built the RPi Pico.
There’s something really fun about writing your own microcontroller code as a software engineer that hasn’t worked with embedded before. At least for me.
Before you just vibe code, consider if it piques your interest. You might just enjoy learning, playing, and building with something new.
When you get stuck, hand it over to AI.
A lot of things wouldn't even need a RP2350. The original Arduino alone was pretty slick for a lot of cool small scale projects.
Our ancestors would spin in their graves seeing how much compute power people throw at a few blinkenlights.
You can get Radxa ROCK 5C 16GB RAM for $160 on AliExpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007473801146.html
A Mac Neo would be great.
But for now, Intel N150 mini PCs are probably a better choice than RPi for those types of tasks.
I saw a talk about a year back with them arguing that things like N150 platforms are probably a better choice than Pi based machines.
Came down to, wide software support with x86, higher performance, UEFI, secure boot and storage standards like NVME slots. It was a fair argument but doesn't apply to everyone.
I dunno, it's not unexpected. Smartphone hardware has been cheaper, more proliferate and faster than Raspberry Pis for a while. The Pi Foundation finds a market by supporting Linux, documenting GPIO and Arduino/hat ecosystems, and advocating for a hackier, server-like approach with the cheap hardware. Game consoles, smartphones and consumer laptops are often powerful, but priced taking the customer's service revenue into account.
My Raspberry Pi is definitely outclassed by a few of my old phones and laptops. But it's also super pleasant to host services on, so it's my go-to SBC.
Phones don't have any I/O and android is a pain in the ass to experiment with. Plus by default it will do things like powersave.
If I could install PostmarketOS (and a close-to-mainline kernel?) on one of my old smartphones, I'd rather use that for my cyberdeck project than a Pi. I'm not prepared to do a pmos bring-up on an unsupported phone, though.
Good luck with that, I think the chance that your phone is supported and works are very slim unless you bought it on purpose for that.
Apple could bridge the gap between Mac Mini Pro and HomePod Mini for the Neo to try experimental local AI configs in need of more memory and storage. The Vision Neo completes the three part environment system for students in biology or morphogenesis and robot design.
Raspberries are basically for DIY projects. I have one on my router handling call blocking for my landline. If it was costing $300 I would rather get a mini PC or use one of my defunct phones with UserLand on it. I can't see any world where a comparison to an entry level laptop makes sense.
You don't need a $300 pi for call blocking. They still make and sell $30 models that will be an overkill for your use case.
Or $3 for an ESP32 devboard.
> Mac Micro
Mac Nano, just like iPods!
Correct take
Mac Nugget. Mac-aroon. SnackBook.
... there is no mac micro, but there is an appletv
Locked down BS appliance.
with that new cheaporino macbook running on the same chip, i imagine it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to install and boot it on tv hardware.
[dead]
The war on general purpose computing is real.
Also known as: supply and demand.
Education price for schools is 499$ for the Neo. Have to agree no longer sure the pi makes much sense at this price point.
These are two very different devices that serve two very different purposes. The comparison is flawed.
Except that a rpi is a device made for learning things and a Neo is a device made to be a door to a shop.
Agree, I just meant on the pricing. I like the rpi, have hads lots of fun with the rpi4 making a custom home media player. Just at this price point not sure it makes much sense for as many people to play around with.
I use two rpi4 with a touchscreen and some relays connected to gpio to control my lights, speakers, heater, and with some USB-powered speakers I have internet radio (usable also as alarm) and I can see when the bus comes and set timers for cooking. Since the USB-powered speakers emit noise when not in use, I power down the USB port entirely when they are not in use. I use openbox to start my software and have a couple of python daemons to control the relays and decide what to turn on and off. Also they don't have a battery so I'm not in need to keep an eye on something that might explode.
PI's are expensive. But they have a very stable and well developed software eco system and are really flexible.
I still buy them. And a lot of them. Because with a Raspberry Pi 5 I'm able to make amazing wildlife camera sysetems that use thermal imaging and local AI to make an extremely effective solar powered wolf detector. I have a system in the field that's been running continuously since September 29 2025, over 8 months autonomously. It also records full frame thermal video in h264 24/7 and I can remotely retrieve images and video. That's a lot of functionality on a Pi 5.
I've collected over 60 videos of wolves from just one site with a Raspberry Pi 5 in this manner. In Belgium... Which is not exactly the biggest hot spot for wolves.
Videos here
https://www.youtube.com/@hcftube1
and here
https://www.youtube.com/@WildlifeSecurityInnovations
What thermal camera are you using with the Pi?
I developed my own one out of very high quality modules from China and added the software to the Pi so all of the driver software is developed in the Netherlands from our company. Note this was no small matter. It's a product now. But currently we sell them on a project mode till we get all the scalability in place to sell them as boxed units.
https://wildlifesecurityinnovations.com/
Plus the run the pi in secure boot mode with encrypted drives, precisely so we can sell them as a product without loosing all our IP that goes into this. Another nice things about the Pi 5 as a platform as it's possible to do this.
The modules originally come from the company behind guideIR. Personally I think they are the best thermal sensors available. They have amazing onboard image processing so that the living things really popout in the image, you can see this in the videos.
We have photos in the banner for the website. The modules are tiny but we 3D print rain shielding enclosures for them.
We have photos of the wolf project in here
https://wildlifesecurityinnovations.com/projects/wolves-belg...
The modules draw just 1W of power, so they are great for our wildlife camera systems. And of course, they get images day and night. And we use thermal image motion detection to trigger the local AI inference. Normal PIR triggered wildlife systems can only triggrer on largish animals quite close by (Check out the wild boar video from this morning, you could never detect this with a traditional wildlife camera that uses PIR sensors https://youtu.be/rmav8IjWxeo). We can detect animals easy in the 50-100m range and with 24/7 thermal recording we can go back in time, invaluable for behavioral research.
I'm pretty sure we have the only wildlife camera system with thermal modules in high resolutions. All thanks to the Pi 5.
(Actually, we also run this with an ultra low light visible camera, also recording 24/7. With audio in both thermal and visible stream. Running on the same platform). Videos also online with the other videos.
How are you getting the thermal sensors out of china without running into the export/import restrictions on dual-use tech? Without correct import licensing I've been limited to 9fps and other restrictions (if I want to do it legally).
I have a good relationship with our supplier and they apply for all necessary legal requirements.
What country are you from ? There’s a list of countries that we can ship to (Only whole systems as that’s our product). 640 resolution requires export licenses for us to countries outside of the EU. We apply for those for our customers. You will need to supply end user statements and identify who you are.
The modules we ship have 25 fps frame rate.
The UK is in the list of countries we can ship to. It is outside of the EU so we would need to apply for an export license for you.
384x288 resolution does not require an export license for us to ship to the UK. But it does require an end user statement.
However, if the UK also requires an import license, then I have no advice for you here. Interesting to know though, as it would complicate exporting to there.
We can supply camera systems in resolutions 385x288, 640x512 and 1280x1024.
The 1280x1024 modules are out of this world, but very expensive. Here is a video from one of those.
https://youtu.be/-QSkPBqTZh8?si=kEc18Ji2cxOpIEsJ
Later when scalability is in place then also 256x192.
BTW, I'm also from New Zealand originally. Manurewa :-)
I really struggle to see where this fits in to most use cases. The appeal of the Pi back in the first iterations was being a relatively cheap linux computer with GPIO.
This (the 16GB version) should not fit into most use cases. You’re buying an expensive RAM chip with a Pi attached.
The cheaper 4GB or even 1GB versions ($50 for the latter) are what most people should be looking at for their projects.
I have decided that the Pi4 1GB is the ideal for hobbyists. Faster than Pi3, takes normal USB-C charging, and can do most single server or electronics jobs. Which is why it is currently sold out.
I agree... I use a Pi4B 8GB as a home server with a number of duties.
Less power consumption than the Pi 5 (and no heatsink), and it was the first to offer the combination of USB booting, more than 1GB RAM, and Gigabit Ethernet. And reasonably priced in 2019.
My personal fave RPi, the Zero W, is still $15 from Adafruit.
I really wish they made a new Zero that doesn't use ddr2 ram to ensure that it can still be made far into the future. As far as I'm aware, nobody is making ddr2 anymore
DDR2 is absolutely still made - there are industrial embedded applications that can't use anything else.
Is anyone making DDR5?
For AI, sure
Mostly HBM; uses more or less the same production lines so has displaced most DDR5 production.
The original vision IIRC was to provide a cheap computer for students in low-income families. You could plug into your TV at home and start learning.
Then the hobby community got wind of it and proceeded to buy out all the stock on every release (myself included, I still have one of every first 3 versions sitting in my cabinet)
At this stage I think the way to realize this "cheap computer" vision is in unlocking smartphones. Either with an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone, or with an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS.
"an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone": https://postmarketos.org/
"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.
There is an unbelievable amount of e waste created because OEMs locked the software down and stopped updating it. I have an android tablet which is functionally working but effectively useless.
I have been trying out the FX1s. It is a good replacement with some rough edges still. Better battery life than previous Pixel 6a and Fairphone 4.
Dock can not handle an Ultrawide 1440x3440 display.
Right now it is a backup phone and my music player.
https://furilabs.com/
The 80s kid in me still thinks dropping someone into a linux shell with a bunch of tools and no internet access is the best learning environment. Kids these days with their fancy tiktoks and such need to summon the old ways.
The 80s kid me lived in a small town with no access to technical manuals or people who could help. The developer manuals for $80 each or a compuserve account to get access to the source code examples of the manufacturer were completely out of reach. What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
> What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
Probably nothing. That free info also comes with YouTube and TikTok and every TV show and movie and game on demand. You have to be very disciplined to focus on difficult topics in a sea of easier and more gratifying entertainment.
The concept of a cheap new computer like an RPi for poor families is a 1st world solution that doesn't understand markets. Used computers are way more popular in countries where the price of new computers are out of reach.
It's a supply chain problem, n
This was over 10 years ago, and the original price was something like £35.
It was tiny, and the assumption was correct - most families had an HDMI capable TV and could afford the device and a usb keyboard.
A used PC still needs a desk and a monitor. This was far more accessible.
In 2014 I bought a used RM desktop PC for my parents for £50 from eBay, which came with the tower, keyboard, mouse and all cables. I had an old monitor laying around, but again, easy to pick up if needed. They still use it today.
People have been saying this for years, yet Raspberry Pis just keep on selling with no trouble.
RPis get sold more to the businesses and startups that started with them in 2010s, rather than hobbyists now.
If you cannot negotiate a good deal with the big industrial silicon manufacturers but you want good up-to-date kernels, RPis are a perfect option.
There are SoMs or SBCs with other CPUs like NXP or MediaTek that has more or less mainline support. However, they ask more money. The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel issues that the CPU and the board manufacturer missed.
There are also lots of cheaper SoMs if you're not allergic to Chinese chipsets, and the cheaper ones tend to have PoP on-package DDR so you can spin your own 4-layer PCB without having to pull your hair out impedance matching DDR3+ traces. That, of course, if you can fit into ~64MB RAM.
> The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel
NXP/i.MX are way better at mainline kernel than Broadcom that RPi is based on, come on.. and they have cheaper options like i.MX 9 series. Other vendors, yes, mainline support could be pretty spotty.
Raspberry Pi’s keep selling because the software ecosystem is solid.
Yeah they do keep selling, I wonder though if hobbyist sales have dropped.
You should really look at the Pi Zero 2 W. Similar capabilities to the 3B for <$20. The Pico 2 is also cheap and very capable if you don't actually need Linux. Most projects don't need a Pi 5.
Yeah that's why I have so many ESP32-S3's around, no project I've done actually needs Linux and the boot times and SD card problems that come with using a Pi.
The value and capabilities of ESP32s are incredible. Most projects I see that use Linux to drive a GPIO would be better served by an ESP32 almost every time. They can even be coded using Arduino, and LLMs can produce Arduino code easily. The boot instantly, consume extremely little power, and are so small they make even a PI Zero look like a giant brick.
> 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN
> Bluetooth 4.2, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), onboard antenna
Oof ... BLE 5 has some huge improvements over 4.2. BLE 5 stuff has been on sale for almost 10 years now ...
Hopefully this gets a refresh soon.
It's useful if you need GPIO but not $350 useful. Nowadays you can get used office mini PCs with a 10th gen Intel and 16GB RAM for like $200 and they'll come with an SSD. No idea why anyone would buy an expensive Pi.
And GPIO support for your used office equipment is often just a cheap USB adapter away too, GPIO support is not some Pi exclusive thing, even if its 40 pin layout is widely used now etc.
It's not the GPIO, it's the software ecosystem for anything you would want to connect to the GPIO.
Sure, but none of the hardware peripherals routed out to those pins are exclusive to that pin header.
If you need a few i2c or SPI or uart buses or even just general purpose IO then AliExpress has a gazillion little USB based modules that will get you exactly that.
If you're still very new to electronics and not at all comfortable going outside of well-established curriculum that explicitly says use this raspberry pi with this sensor attached on these pins with this library configured in this way... Yes. But that can't be most of the people paying this price?
Most of the people buying raspberry pis are industrial customers who are not on the fence about whether to buy an SBC or someone’s trashed PC.
You don't seem to get it.
SBC Customer: Let's say I build a product using your latest SBC. Will it get updates after I bought it?
SBC Vendor: No
SBC Customer: Okay, but surely I can at least buy more in 2035?
SBC Vendor: No
SBC Customer: Why would anyone building a commercial product be interested in your particular SBC then?
SBC Vendor: We expect you to buy and then regret your purchase.
What are you wanting to use it for? There is using Pi as desktop, which was only option for a while, but now mini PCs are much better. There is using it as server, where mini PCs are better for homelabs and multiple services but Pi is good for lightweight single service. Then there is hobbyist use, where Pi is cheap when get lightweight one and has ecosystem of hardware and software.
They're relatively common in industrial applications now because they have really good software support and great long-term availability.
This effect plays around again and again. Someone makes something for the public good, and corporations show up and take advantage of it. Basically the story of FOSS too, when you think about it.
They launched the compute module which was intended for industrial use a mere two years after the first Pi.
The corporations are paying for the product. The pi foundation could invest that in to making more and developing the product further.
The Raspberry Pi 5 uses LPDDR4X. Finding 16GB (128Gb with a small b) chips in this size is not common. That memory chip is at least $200, probably more, even at the scale that they’re buying them.
I’m glad they’re making it available for the rare cases where it’s needed, but for PR purposes it would have been better if they just discontinued the 16GB model until RAM prices came down. I’m getting tired of hearing “Raspberry Pi 5 costs $300” now from people who have no reason to buy the 16GB version.
The 1GB version works well for simple Linux shell work and embedded projects. It’s $50.
The 4GB version works well for GUI work. Let’s be real: It’s a slow device and not a desktop/laptop alternative in 2026, so 4GB goes a long way for the use cases where you want to do basic GUI work. $110 for the 4GB model (if you shop not at Adafruit)
EDIT: Adafruit prices are higher for some reason. 16GB Pi 5 is $305 on other sites.
So strange. I can probably sell my 4GB Pi 5 for about 40% more than I bought it for... 3 years ago. This isn't how computers are supposed to work, let alone Pis.
I get what's happening, but it's strange to see it happening.
Actually, could I sell it for ~10% less than someone would buy it new? Is there a market for used Pis? Maybe 30%, I don't know. That I can sell it for what I got it for at all is wild.
It is strange, but it's not any stranger than any other time of relative scarcity.
We just aren't making enough stuff to keep up with demand.
This kind of thing has happened before.
Some computer-oriented highlights from the memory hole: An epoxy plant burned in 1993 that had supplied ~60% of that stuff for semiconductor packaging which caused widespread issues, there were aspects of RAM shortages in middle 90s (mostly because Windows adoption increased demand), we had Thailand floods that screwed up hard drive production, we had the crypto boom affecting GPUs in a big way from ~2016 to ~2022. There were covid-era chip shortages (which had been rationally predicted years before the covid scramble) while the Chia crypto bubble also ate up storage devices around that time.
It sucks for consumers (read: buyers) when this stuff happens, but it's been pretty normal for a really long time.
The current shortage is due to hugely-increased demand in the datacenter space and that's a new problem, but it's just one in a long list of problems that had been new when they surfaced. :)
---
Anyway, yeah: When prices are high, it becomes time to go through the pile of hardware and sell some stuff.
I'm still surprised that cryptocurrency fucking the GPU market was just a warm-up for the real supply chain shortages.
Future humans realized AI was the only way to beat the aliens and sent a message to the past with instructions to invent crypto so that the infrastructure would be ready for the majority of timelines.
Good point, everyone was expecting GPU prices to go down and all crypto bros to drop their mining rigs, but they can just repurpose them now...
I thought anyone serious about mining switched to ASICs and custom hardware a while ago. At least for BTC and maybe eth, a custom asic setup is ~2-3x more profitable
Yep. You've got it right.
BTC has been an ASIC game for a very long time. GPUs haven't been profitable there since the ASICs showed up a dozen or so years ago (with odd exceptions where power is "free").
Eth kept hitting the GPU market hard until ~4 years ago, when the network switched from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. That cut the home-gamer hobbyist miners out rather completely.
(That last one kind of sucked for me. When my office-room had resistive heating, I rather liked getting paid for my otherwise-idle GPU to make heat for me in the winter time. It wasn't much, but >0 is more than <0.)
Ethereum switched to proof of stake in 2022. The cryptocurrency inflicted GPU shortage began in 2017. You're talking about an event that is basically a decade ago at this point.
It is free market supply and demand. Clearly a stronger force than Moore's law.
Huh and I am running home assistant on my Pi 5 I guess it is time to sell.
A lot of computer parts can be sold at a high profit nowadays.
This isn't exactly news, that model has been at $350 for a while.
It's not like RPi suddenly introduced a 16GB model at a ridiculous price due to having forgotten about low cost stuff. The 16GB model was originally $85 iirc. Then the memory shortage hit. They could either withdraw the 16GB model (maybe screwing over some people who absolutely had to have it) or raise the price for those with urgent enough requirements. They did the latter.
Me, I'd like to see some large MCU's (let's say a little above RP2350 / ESP32 level) with a few MB of memory, but with memory protection, like old fashioned Vaxes with that much memory. That would allow running multiprocessing OS's where the processes couldn't easily clobber each other like on the current stuff. Many programs don't require GB's of ram.
I don't think they can withdraw a model easily, they also supply Pis to industrial markets and they probably have contracts that guarantee supply for a given time period.
16GB was $120 at launch. Even at that price it was a stretch and really only useful in some niches. The 4 or 8 GB models were always the best value. Now those are a bit too much, for what you get.
I still think there are good applications for the <4 GB Pi 5s, but for a lot of projects I just stick with a Pi 4 or CM4 now.
Ah ok, $120, then $85 may have been the 8GB version. I remember being annoyed that to get the NVMe slot in the 500, I would have had to buy the 500+ with 16GB of ram and the mechanical keyboard, neither of which I wanted. It was at the time around $200 while an 8GB regular 500 was maybe half that.
It looks like a pi 5 is $10 more than a pi 4 in most (all?) sizes. Seems worth it for the NVMe slot by itself. SD cards are awful. I'm not buying until the ram situation settles though. I have a 400 (4gb pi 4 in a keyboard) that I use for some things.
My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops that I got from BYU Surplus and added some RAM (before RAM price went totally bananas) and SSDs to. I spent less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.
I later added a large machine that I used to use as a Linux desktop, with a GPU and 64GB RAM, which I use for generating OpenStreetMap tiles.
> My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops
I used to do this as well and this is fine if you're able to source cheap power. But I'm in the UK, electricity prices are insane and I can't afford to run this kind of setup any more.
it's not unmanageable to do if you have plentiful and cheap access to area that can see the sun. My 'vintage' computing collection got a lot bigger when I switched to solar.
a big ask in most of the UK, though.
> less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.
Before RAM went crazy, the Pi 4 was $75 for *8GB and $125 for 16GB.
Another consideration is heat and power consumption, I have an OptiPlex micro (also surplus) and power consumption is 8W-90W (standby versus peak), 5x-10x more than a Pi 4.
Similar here. I lucked out, a charity in the UK (Bernados) has an ebay account and they had a huge joblot of about 200 brand new DELL Optiplex 3050 Micros (i7 6700T, 16GB DDR4, 1tb SSDs).
I picked up 4, at £50 each, and when they arrived they were still sealed, and included a power supply, keyboard, mouse and windows 11 license (which never got used).
Makes the pi look like a terrible deal given you've also gotta buy power supply, a hdmi adapter for their moronic decision to use mini hdmi, etc
How much power does that cluster consume?
It has definitely been a crazy few months for prices.
On 2025-12-18 I bought a RPi 5 kit on Amazon from CanaKit that consisted of an 8 GB Pi 5 with the official RPi 5 256 GB SSD, case, fan, 45W power supply, and some cables which came fully assembled.
It was $209.99.
Today it is $339.97.
On 2025-09-02 I bought a Samsung 1 TB EVO Plus M.2 SSD along with along with a Sabrent USB-C M.2/SATA enclosure to use with my RPi 4.
It was $64.99 for the SSD and $22.75 for the enclosure.
Today the SSD is $255.00 (down a little from the $261.08 it reached last month) and the enclosure is $29.95.
BTW, if you are looking for an RPi it looks like you can't rely on the prices shown on rpilocator.com.
Right now for example it lists RPi 5 8 GB in stock in the US for $80 (Digi-Key), $175 (Pishop), and $200 (Adafruit). Similar for 4 GB ($60, $110, $130 at those three sellers, in the same order). Same pattern for RPi 4. 8 GB from the same three sellers in the same order: $75, $165, $190. 4 GB $55, $100, $120.
Clicking the links reveals all the Digi-Key entries are wrong. Their actual price is the same as Pishop (whose rpilocator.com entries seem to be correct).
In August 2025 I bought a Pi 5 (4GB) Official Black Kit for 92 Euro @Welectron. To be fair, it's now sold for "only" 143 Euro. Expected more.
Hopefully there's a glut in the future
Pi's attraction was that it was a cheap hobby computer. I could buy a whole laptop for that money.
I know RAM prices are crazy right now, but I just bought a 16gb Ryzen 7 motherboard to repair an IdeaPad for €70
You can still get Radxa ROCK 5C 16GB RAM for $160 on AliExpress: https://pl.aliexpress.com/item/1005007473801146.html
But no ethernet port, no GPIO, no fanless.
It's comparing two completely different usecases.
Plenty of laptops have Ethernet, and as for fanless, a lot of people choose active cooling for a pi5
I can get a (used) fanless laptop and a USB GPIO/I2C/SPI/CAN/whatever adapter for that money. Raspberry Pis started at ~$30 for a minimal configuration. They were so cheap that they killed the whole overpriced range of $100 to $200 dev boards by vendors that tried to make money of dev boards for their chips.
They have to be cheap enough that tinkers leave them in their projects.
But the result is huge, you cannot 3d print a custom case for that and put it somewhere at home…
You might be surprised how small a laptop motherboard can be. Once you take away screen, keyboard, battery, speakers, daughter boards and all that, you can have an actively cooled motherboard as slim as a pi and not much bigger.
If you need something really tiny, an esp32 can do a lot of what we used to use a pi for. Driving an eink display for example
Could you 3d print a case for the usb dongle and the breadboard, and then Velcro that to the laptop?
I mean… yes… but you still have a laptop sitting there :D
I’ve used Pi’s quite a bit and probably could have used something else for a lot of applications. When the Pi Pico came out that was an absolute dream for a lot more projects but still lacked the amount of RAM and Flash memory for some projects. Recently I came across the Waveshare ESP32-P4-Module Basic Kit that has 16MB of Flash and 8MB of PSRAM. The board comes in a Pi form factor with the 40 header and MIPI connections for camera and LCD. I’ve been able to port a Linux app by using the ESP IDF port of FreeRTOS and Vuejs/Tailwind for a web UI. The ESP32 P4 has dual core 360/400MHz RISC 5 with a Ethernet port. Waveshare added the C6 to the SOM if you want WiFi. That device is now my go to for anything that used to be done on a Pi. For a lot of other things the ESP32 S3 with the slower flash and PSRAM is the lowest cost that you can find.
You can still get a cheaper brand new SBC - Radxa ROCK 5C with 16GB RAM for $160 or ROCK 5C Lite with 16GB RAM for $140 on AliExpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007473801146.html
Who would've thought the $50 pi 5 I bought on a whim would be my best performing asset in the last few years
$50 would have bought the 2GB model at launch.
The 2GB model is now $65, so don’t get too excited.
I checked my email and I paid $60 for the 4GB model in 2023. >2x returns in 3 years isn't so bad.
This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
I first checked for Mac Minis and interestingly they are much closer to $650 for similar specs.
And obviously if Intel is fine for your use case, either the N100 type of mini PC or, my preference, an off-lease HP, Dell, or Lenovo USFF PC, would be like half that for a very capable machine.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=m1%20macbook%20air%2016...
> This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
That "laptop" will also absolutely smoke the Pi on performance, too:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/24356484?baseli...
For what it is worth, an M4 mac mini is also like 30-50x faster. Like, legitimately.
MacBook Neo for $600 is the only laptop under $999 worth looking at nowadays. Apple used to be the expensive premium option and they’re basically the cheapest today. What a time to be alive.
???
Even if you're an Apple fan, surely you don't believe that the Neo obsoletes the Air. The $500-$1,000 price segment has been alive and kicking since well before the Neo.
I'm saying there is no point in buying a cheap Air. Buy the better specced ones or the Neo.
Two years ago I bought 192GB RAM for my desktop (2 sets of 2x48GB) for $700. Today, the Amazon price for the same sets is $2500. The world is insane.
we've lost the plot. this is no longer a hobbyist computer.
Two months ago I bought a M4 Mini w/16GB and 512GB HDD for $599. Granted they're up to $799 right now, but a Rpi is now $350 when they used to be $35?
You're correct; they've jumped the shark.
Two things to note:
1) Apple had long term contracts for memory which will run out. Afterwards it will be very interesting to see what they do.
2) RPi uses older memory that is much much more expensive to buy in the market as manufacturers have dedicated capacity to newer formats used by AI boxes for KV caches
The linked model has 16x the amount of RAM that $35 model had. You can still get a 1GB model for less than $50.
You can get an Intel N100 NUC with 16GB ram, 500GB ssd on Amazon for less though.
This is just very expensive for what it is.
These perform way better and have similar efficiency, too. Case, power supply, cooling, and storage are all included too. If you don't need GPIO then you don't need a Raspberry Pi. If you do then consider using a microcontroller (Pi Pico, ESP32, etc.) first.
If you just want a tiny desktop computer, sure. The reason to buy a Pi is for the GPIO and the well-established ecosystem.
Not really the Pi's fault - really it's AI causing the massive increase in HW prices (notably RAM in this case) that has really destroyed the market for the Pi's.
Same thing happening for servers, gaming PC's, cell phones, so on.
I really don't know who this is targeted at. As a development board these are extremely expensive and as a mini computer you're far better off with something N100 based or similar.
What market is this trying to compete in?
It's targeted at someone who wants a board with some memory on it. Memory prices and supply shortages are insane at the moment
To me it seems like they are just cannibalizing their customer base that bought into their ecosystem early.
Ecosystem bought in does not require you to buy the latest and most expensive board.
The Pi 1 model B+ was released in 2014. They still make and support it today and will keep doing it until at least 2030. You can just buy that instead. They are not apple.
Feels like they’re just surfing the name recognition wave at this point.
I think you're overlooking the 16GB part, it's a niche of a niche device... 1GB is still $50
This is because on a COGs basis it is memory with a side of compute.
Pi hasn't been a hobbyist computer since they were prioritised for large-volume business purchasers during COVID.
As for the education market, that's a long forgotten pipedream.
Hobbyists spend shittons of money on their hobbies. A drawer full of raspberry pis is nothing.
Search Aliexpress for ESP32-C3 Development Board for Arduino
At least get a -C6 if you're trying to replace a Pi with a microcontroller.
ESP32-C6 is $6 but ESP32-C3 is $3 )))
Search arace.tech for Radxa or Milk-V boards.
Unfortunately Radxa and Milk-V are almost completely out of stock and not much cheaper. If you need more than a microcontroller there's no circumventing the memory shortage at this point.
Kicking myself for not buying the Q6A at the beginning of the year (I wanted three and arace would only sell one per customer, but one would've been better than none).
Microcenter (another official US reseller) sells the Pi5 16GB at a much lower price[1].
1. https://www.microcenter.com/product/702590/raspberry-pi-5
$289, for everybody who doesn't want to click.
Only if you live near a store with it in stock. They aren't shipping that item.
Earliest snapshot from IA is $120. That's almost 3x increase since then. I knew the component shortage was bad but not this bad.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250529094904/https://www.adafr...
That price I'd just buy an Optiplex or something
I have 4 RPi servers in my house on 24/7 but yeah
Funny different purpose but I bought a 2017 Pixelbook put Ubuntu on it, great machine it was $80
Similar situation, one thing I like the with the Pis design is you can throw PoE hats on them and build a whole home infrastructure system where the only thing that needs battery backup for power cuts is the main ethernet switch - all of the essential services, switches and wifi APs are powered downstream by their ethernet ports over PoE.
Makes making your key network services (VPN, firewall, DNS, NTP, home assistant etc) on battery backup very easy, as just one plug to the primary switch to keep powered, and my wifi/internet stays on when the power cuts.
I could use other devices, but 5 pis with PoE hats rack mount very cleanly in a single 1U row and passively cooled with no fan noise etc.
Just don't get a Dell server:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-memory-upgrade-32-gb-2r...
Holy f that's crazy. No I only get the Dell optiplex 9100 or whatever plus a cheap 1050ti GPU to play older games with
I would never undestand this phenomenon, 350$ is a price you can buy a Ryzen mini PC instead...
In my country there is virtually no possibility to buy the newest PI, and even if it is possible, it won't cost the main price, but always more...
Raspberries are cool for tinkering with hardware, learning how to write kernel drivers etc. But I think this is how maybe 30% of Raspberries are used. People do uncanny things to turn those boards into something we already have on the market - mini PCs, and thin clients. For my home server, I replaced Raspberry Pi with a used HP T630 I bought for the quarter of the Pi's price, and that was a good decision.
Frequently used argument against mini PCs is lack of GPIO. There are adapters based on FT2232H. The drivers are lame or non-existent, though, so I wrote one by myself, so the chip appears in system as native GPIO port which makes it easier to use with various programs. "itachilab/ftdi-gpio" if someone is interested.
And the 8GB one is $200. For 70$ more you get the Jetson Orin Nano with comparable single core speed but with two more cores, LPDDR5 with 5x as much memory bandwidth, more IO, and an entire GPU.
Even worse, continued RAM shortages and inflation might actually mean that will have been a good price in a year's time.
Every day I go to bed praying CXMT hurries the *$!@ up and dumps an ungodly amount of cheap RAM upon global markets
I wonder so much what their initial capacity was (which ought to go up marginally, and what their expected capacity curves look like.
I would not expect them to dump cheap ram. That is a false hope. The world needs volume, massively more volume, and it feels like everyone else is going to take a sizable fraction of a decade to even start responding. Maybe perhaps possibly CXMT can scale fast, but they have many multiples to grow before they are more than a drop in the bucket.
It's also unclear when if they too will want to start stacking 12 then 16 then 24 rams atop each other, to sell chips that cost what multiples of what GPUs used to.
if anything, pricing will be around the same. Difference will be in availability.
At some point saturation effects will dampen prices
They won't, no one will. Too much investment for too much of a risk of the bubble popping and yet another run of the boom-bust cycle that left the world with not even a handful of RAM makers in the first place.
Chinese manufacturers are masters of razor thin margins and flooding the market to crush the competition.
Indeed but China doesn't have access to EUV lithography from ASML.
They will find a way to make something work even without EUV
The memory price rises are flattening. Prices are still increasing but not at the rate they previously were last year.
Remember the good old days of impulse buying the latest Raspberry Pi?
The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer with native support for UART, SPI, I2C, CSI, and more. There's a large ecosystem of HATs, sensors, and peripherals built specifically for it. Most mini PCs rely on USB for peripherals, which isn't ideal for embedded use cases. Additionally, mini PCs tend to be discontinued within 2–3 years, whereas the Pi has much longer lifecycle over a decade. It's closer to an ARM development board, and those alternatives aren't cheap.
There are plenty of Pi clone boards at lower prices, but they have smaller communities and less documentation. When you hit an unexpected problem, it can be hard to find solutions or get support.
Come on, a one gigabyte Pi is under $50. There's no plot lost, it's just expensive RAM. 2gb is $75. That's where Pi plays well.
Yet the Radxa Rock 4d[1] has 4Gb and is selling for 69 dollars.
[1]: https://arace.tech/products/radxa-rock-4d
Four of those would be $280 though, so this doesn't seem hilariously out of scale with that.
But ram prices don't scale linearly. The 4Gb variant of RPi5 is $130.
Radxa does have a 16Gb board[1] on pre-order, coming in at $329. Though the Dragon Q8B appears to be quite a bit more capable.
[1]: https://arace.tech/products/radxa-dragon-q8b
I don't think I have any beef with what you're pointing out - I was only saying that I don't think the Radxa products' pricing are demonstrating anything too shocking about the Rpi products' pricing.
I personally would probably choose one of those over a Rpi (but would probably still rather buy more off-lease Elitedesk G6 Minis, which is what I use for 'lil computer' projects)
> I was only saying that I don't think the Radxa products' pricing are demonstrating anything too shocking about the Rpi products' pricing.
I agree it's not too shocking, I think prices have increased everywhere including competitors.
> off-lease Elitedesk G6 Minis
Those are great if you can surface them!
I've also been enjoying the N100 mini-ITX boards from ASROCK[1] and ASUS. Great choice if you already have a power supply and some RAM stockpiled. The ASUS one uses SODIMM. They use very little power.
[1]: https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/index.asp
Are Raspberry Pis (UK country of origin) exempt from the 10% baseline import tariff?
Are they actually made in the UK?
I'd presume they're shipped from China like most tech goods.
Some are made in China and Japan, most are made in Wales.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-raspberry-pis-are...
They actually have a factory in the UK, one that previously made Sony TVs IIRC.
I have one of these linked to a LimeSDR running GNUradio and it’s absolutely up to the task.
Or one can also get a better specification i5 or Ryzen 4650U laptop for <$260 with SSD and LCD, then hot glue a 32bit Arduino to the lid.
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100017489%204016%20601497625%2...
Dram prices and Flash prices are inflated right now, but the pi were never focused on Desktop users. As a platform it no longer makes sense for many use cases. =3
What are they used for? Its CPU's PassMark scores an average of 4,246. A quick check on AMZN: https://www.amazon.com/KAMRUI-Mini-PC-i3-10110U-Bluetooth/dp... uses AMD Ryzen 4300U (scores 7364), 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, supports 3 4k (maybe 30HZ) monitors at the same time. That mini pc cost $289.
Every time I see entitled people crying because of the prices of a Rasperry Py I remember my first computer that had hundred of megahertz's speed and megabytes of RAM.
I could do very useful things with that machine. So it is not the end of the world if we have to go back to a world when you merely have thousands of times more memory for 4 times less money.
It could even be positive if it forces people to be more efficient writing code and wasting less resources.
This is really sad. Me and my girlfriend at the time watched all of our movies off of a Pi 1 and a USB hard drive when it came out. Those days are long gone.
You don't need the 16GB model to watch movies, you can do that on the cheapest ones.
You can still buy a 4GB HP T520 thin client for around $25 on eBay. The Radeon GPU has a HW h264 decoder.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/185826328888?_skw=hp+t520
The $35 computer, for only $350!
Imagine having a business relying on the Pi boards! It’s worth adding Pi4@1GB still costs $35 but any other memory configurations (and Pi5) go for much more now.
Raspberry Pi as a company does ~$325M in annual revenue.
But I can’t understand what are the use cases to be selling 73M units.
Would anyone mind sharing what are the broadly applicable use cases, because selling 73M units is well beyond hobbyist fun.
https://investors.raspberrypi.com/
Well, there are a lot of products being made and sold using Raspberry Pi. I have seen people use it to make interactive content on screens at escape rooms, and use it as a computer for digital signage that shows the same content on a loop.
6 months ago, I also started experimenting with Raspberry Pi, and now I am working on a Chromecast alternative for businesses called Soljacast using RPi. My device can work as digital signage, or a casting device for co-workings and event companies that use computers at events for presentations.
I am also using it to build a personal companion AI device with a screen, sort of like an Amazon Echo Show but with Microsoft's Clippy in there. So I am sure people are building even more complex stuff than me.
Here is a video of how my device is being used at a local exhibition venue: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FF3I9EOs4AA
They’ve been selling much more to industrial customers than hobbyists for the better part of a decade.
Consider that entire product lines for random widgets you see in every day life in the dozens or hundreds have Pis inside now. A lot of "smart" things are just the thing plus a Compute Module.
There are smart parking garage lights, smart inspection cameras, smart golf ball dispensers... all these things have enough margin they can absorb a 100-300% component increase, though I'm sure they don't like it.
Very few commercial and industrial products use a Pi though.
Pi - 73 million sold
ESP32 - 1 billion sold
STM32 - 13 billion sold
For every 1 Pi sold, there’s almost 200 STM32s sold.
The next point under your quoted sales figure:
25% Enthusiasts and education 75% Industrial and embedded
off the top of my head: ip kvms, keyboards, 3d printers, home assistant, cameras, zwave or zigbee. Their moat is superb software support and established ecosystem. I think their most challenging competition would be ESP32s or mini pcs. Source: my ahh
I really wanted to buy a new one, but the prices have gone up. I better find old pc's from 2000 and after, will similar job for what I'm looking.
Yea $350 is crazy, with that kind of money you can buy a new firebat style mini PC that will run circles around the raspberryPi performance wise.
I’m surprised to see those legacy USB ports on a board where space savings is important. Do they do it for backwards compatibility with older cases and housings?
And am I correct to see that the USB-C only does power? How do you connect your pheripherals to this board?
I think legacy USB peripherals are very common. Almost all of my peripherals are legacy USB; I think I only own a single USB-C peripheral. Old stuff still works, so I don't need to buy new ones.
Interesting. I don’t own any legacy USB equipment anymore, everything is USB-C now. I started phasing out my old equipment ten years ago and everything from the past five years has had USB-C as standard. Even my shaver chargers over USB-C.
I guess that the people who use $350 boards also mainly use USB-C. Unless you want to connect old hardware to it but I don’t see that use-case.
Not being able to connect my devices to this board is a blocker for me.
A person who can justify spending $350 on an SBC can probably manage to shake enough change out of the sofa to buy an adapter to plug their widgets into it.
But, sure: It's definitely even cheaper than that to just sit back and complain about it.
Looks like all the USB-A devices purchased over the past 30 years have not been trashed and some people still use them.
Understandable but I would have preferred a couple of fully functional USB-C ports and then have people use dongles for using old hardware on this board. Similar to using a serial adapter.
There are still new USB-A devices being sold, it's not like it's deprecated or something
That is now illegal in the European Union. Everything sold is required to have USB-C.
> From 28 December 2024, the rules apply to mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, headsets, videogame consoles, portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems and earbuds sold in the EU. From 28 April 2026, they will also apply to laptops.
You’re not allowed to sell keyboard and mice with USB-A port? Doubt it. Can you link the source you’re quoting?
Edit:
It’s this right?
https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-common-c...
That’s only for battery powered devices afaik.
Got it. I guess some people still use wired mice and keyboards with legacy connectors. But how many of those use them on a $350 board? Seems like a very small use case. I personally use Bluetooth for that, been doing that for the past 20 years.
You insist on calling it legacy connectors, but they are just perfectly good current day connectors to connect a keyboard, a video game controller, a USB drive, a printer, a scanner or the Bluetooth dongle for your Bluetooth mouse. I think only Apple decided that it was deprecated for them because it did not allow them to make their laptops thin enough to their taste. Meanwhile the rest of the world is perfectly fine with it for many use cases. You might also not believe it, but I also still use HDMI cables for screens, like a caveman ;)
For 350 USD, and note that this is without a case, storage and power, you can also buy a N100 or N150 mini pc.
The Pi was supposed to be cheap. What happened.
> What happened.
Ram prices.
Hey, at least you can buy them. Small comfort but remember during covid when you couldn't even get a Raspberry Pi?
Truly tragic we are going through this again but here we are.
Horrible board, even at the old price. The Pi stopped making sense after the original one, if you exclude the Zero/Pico.
2 years ago I bought a Dell R630 for about this much with 128GB of RAM and 2 beefy xeons (for their gen, anyhow). Oh, how the times have changed.
Well, I'm happy to have mine with 4 GB, as it was purchased before the crisis.
A Lenovo x280 i5 8th gen with 16gb Ram 256gb ssd cost less than that and run faster with screen and keyboard. You can dual boot Linux and Windows. You can also install OpenClaw or Hermes. Plenty of x280 or L14 in secondhand market. I don't see the point of buying Pi5. Unless you are collector of Pi stuff.
I have a Chromebook lying around that is cheaper than this... memory prices are crazy!
That's more expensive than an equivalently specced MeLE fanless PC, which is an entire Intel PC.
Holy cow. I know I'm not supposed to be surprised given the memory shortage, but that is insane level.
Up ~50% about 2 months ago (4/2026)
Its the same picture for all of them. Why load different half a megabyte images for each pi?
It's worth mentioning you're paying a $45 Adafruit tax here. Adafruit charges more for Pis.
The US has a plethora of alternative authorised resellers who are lower priced:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/#:~:text...
pt's therapy bills get expensive fast.
For embedded products, 1GB can go a long way thanks for linux customization and such.
Damn I think I have one in a drawer.
Sooooooo not worth it.
Pi even before these ram prices was getting expensive and kind of missing the point from my perspective. Definitely good to have them releasing new models.
What bothers me is that now you need cooling for some models, and obviously price is getting too high.
On the other hand... $50 for 1Gb version is excellent still. And you should be able to use it just fine.
Literally none of the pis need cooling. Each is quite a bit faster than the previous generation even if you let it thermally throttle the cpu.
I think people commentating here are missing the point. The cost of that pi is for the 16 GB of RAM. Which in fairness, is a lot of RAM for a device of that type.
You can still buy a Raspberry Pi on a budget if you don’t need that much memory. For example, the 2 GB model is $75.
soon we can run LLM in RP?
At that price? Sorry, no!
I need the 16GB RAM, but I do not have these money anymore. Medical bills.....
I hate this timeline: How is a Pi marginally cheaper than a Mac Mini?
because Apple goes in and buys out entire production cycles based on anticipated demand. Most infamously they got a year worth of TSMCs last new node - no one else could have it.
Usually, that gamble pays off, sometimes it does not (cough Apple Vision), and in some cases they get so many QC rejects that they can make an entire new product line on (financially) worthless scrap, that's how the MacBook Neo came to be - a bunch of iPhone SoC's that failed binning, I think in GPU cores.
Where do you buy your Mac Minis?
Before the personal LLM craze you could easily get $400 Mac Minis from Apple's certified refurbished store. I bought two M2 Pros for that price and turned them into Asahi Linux CI machines.
Cheapest mac mini I could spec out on the apple store right now is about $750, which if you consider how much more capable its M4 processor is than the pi, is a pretty good deal tbh.
In Europe, but I didn't realize the 499 one is also history. Even worse :/
At a store, some stores do have stock. Otherwise apple.com
If you’re on SF I can sell you 16GB Pi 5s for $280. I’ve got a few on hand (new in box).
There's a thousand old laptops with 16GB RAM on eBay for <$200. Do you really need an embedded SOC with GPIO pins to have 16GB RAM?
"Don't you know there's a war on?"
LMAO what a joke. N100 mini PCs are a hundred dollars less and vastly more capable aside from GPIO.
An N100 with no RAM is $100 less, but throw in 16GB of ram and now they’re $150+ more…
Also you’re missing the point.
Sorry, you're right, the 16 GB RAM 500 GB SSD N100 is only $50 less. Amazon /dp/B0DBLLGKPK
Including but not limited to dual gigabit Ethernet (on a PCIe bus), NVMe slots, and a capable power supply is included in the box.
I lucked out having bought a few N95 mini PCs a few years ago. They were even cheaper then with 16GB of RAM out of the box. To me they're vastly superior to the various RPis I replaced.
I sold off my Pi 4s and never bothered with the 5s. I kept my mix of older Pis for projects that need GPIO and of those my Pi Zeros are the ones that really get used.
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The other day I found an optiplex for $20, 16ddr4, 250 ssd sata, core i7. No way in the world I am paying $350 plus tax plus shipping for that!
i would say my first Pi was about 50$, crazy times
was famous for being the $35 computer and it is now $350
I got an i5 Thinkpad T480 for 100usd.. Rpi is a joke
They’re not equivalent devices in almost any dimension. I got a pizza at the grocery store for $6. It has no bearing on raspberry pi being a joke or not.
Agree, but their prices are still bad.. I use Rpi vs. Rockchip/Allwinner, etc. on commercial products. Rpi software is a bit better but after the chip shortage their prices have been artificially inflated..