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DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
- wpferrell 7mo agoTotally agree. Just like graphics card prices. Is it worth building a pc now?
- knicholes 7mo agoAfter discovering Dell Alienware clearance and graphics card availability in those Alienware computers, I haven't felt the need to build a computer for the last five years.
- SV_BubbleTime 7mo agoI looked on their site. I don’t see any section for clearance.
- knicholes 6mo agoI'm sorry. I meant to say "refurbished." https://www.dell.com/en-us/dfh/lp/outlet https://www.dell.com/en-us/dfh/lp/outlet
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- fidotron 7mo agoOTOH things which belong on microcontrollers are now being pushed back to microcontrollers for cost reasons, so there is a win to be found there.
- teaearlgraycold 7mo agoI’ve been having a lot of fun with the Pi Pico 2W. It can host an access point, a web server, be a USB host, and of course has GPIO. And not running an OS means it’s way simpler.
- chromacity 7mo agoEven before the hikes, SBCs were $50-$100 a pop, compared to pennies for basic MCUs and maybe $4 for high-performance ones. People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem ("hats", forums, etc). I don't know if 300x is going to make more hobbyists see the light, or just result in fewer of them being able to afford the hobby?
- charcircuit 7mo agoThat's an apples to oranges comparison. Might as well bring up how people pay thousands of dollars for FPGA boards.
- chromacity 7mo agoNo. Many hobbyists default to SBCs whether they need them or not. No one defaults to FPGA if they don't need it.
- charcircuit 7mo agoMy point is that the FPGA boards are several orders of magnitude more expensive than the actual chip. To be fair you should be comparing between the cost of the SoC and the microcontroller.
- KPGv2 7mo ago> People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem This is obviously logical. If I know how to program in Python or JS but not C and am familiar with SSH, I can do something with a SBC in a few minutes. I get paid $200/hr. If I spent even one hour to learn what I need to deal with a microcontroller, the time cost is four times the cost of materials if I stick with what I know. How many small projects do I need to do in my free time before it's financially smart to learn a whole new technology?
- telotortium 7mo agoWith LLMs, it's potentially a lot easier to use microcontrollers now, depending on how widely available the documentation is now.
- JKCalhoun 7mo agoYeah, never understood why I would want an entire OS running just to blink an LED. I was going to make a pro-Arduino comment but I guess my LED example warrants little more than an R/C circuit and a transistor, ha ha. (Anyway, I still remember the thrill of writing assembly for a 68HC11 and getting a pair of hobby servos to respond.)
- bombcar 7mo agoFamiliarity - it’s easy for us Linux dweebs to build a pi that can flip an LED, but programming an arduino is an entire new area.
- jfim 7mo agoIt's pretty trivial to do so on Arduino though. void setup() { pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT); } void loop() { digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH); delay(1000); digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW); delay(1000); }
- KPGv2 7mo agoWell first you have to learn the Arduino programming language. And the stdlib.
- telotortium 7mo agoGood thing LLMs exist now
- grogenaut 7mo agoit's literally the hello world of micros. get an arduino, plug it into the usb, install the ide, new -> example -> 01. Blink. Press Run. Cool you have now blunk a led. Now use AI to draw the rest of the owl.
- bombcar 7mo ago
- randusername 7mo agoAgree, but there was something special about SBCs being so cheap they were the default recommendation for new hobbyists and I'm sad to see that go. I would not have fallen in love with microcontrollers without Raspberry Pi and PocketCHIP as stepping stones. The messaging of "it's a tiny computer, make whatever you want with it" is so much more approachable than anything I've found on the microcontroller side. Even Arduino. I dismissed it for a long time because I misunderstood it. I thought I had to buy Arduino devices, then Arduino shields, then program them in the Arduino language using the Arduino IDE.
- a1o 7mo agoHoly crap, it is super expensive now. I should have brought an extra one in the past.
- jokoon 7mo agoit's probably time to call those old retired programmers to ask them how to reduce software memory footprint or to teach that again
- rat9988 7mo agoThe art is not lost, just not funded. Feel free to fund the programmers for your own software projects.
- kitsune1 7mo ago[dead]
- tempest_ 7mo agoIt isnt lost but it also isnt a common skill set in programmers any more. Most programmers are JS web devs writing client side code or server side CRUD. I would guess < 10% of programmers writing code today get perf / valgrind out on the regular. I know I dont.
- siruwastaken 7mo agoMost people don't have the chance to do that, but hopefully we can see some other languages get first class access on the web. At least there is the whole WASM project.
- zozbot234 7mo agoYou can still write JS or TypeScript code that tries its best to keep memory use under check. JavaScript was around in the late 90s when the memory footprint of software was at least an order of magnitude lower, so it's absolutely doable.
- tempest_ 7mo agoJavaScript in the late 90s was doing a hell of a lot less than it is today.
- 7mo ago
- jonathantf2 7mo agoDRAM pricing is killing the everything market. We just had a vendor uplift our quote 50% per unit for some machines because of a mix of memory + supply chain issues.
- dangus 7mo agoThat’s strange, there aren’t wider market supply chain issues outside of DRAM. Maybe your vendor is just throwing excuses around.
- OJFord 7mo agoDRAM is up more than that 50% though.
- ls612 7mo agoSSDs and HDDs are being squeezed as well.
- mhitza 7mo agoDon't forget SDCards "Memory card prices have TRIPLED in the last few months: when will this madness stop?!" https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/cameras/memory-cards/memory-card-prices-have-tripled-in-the-last-few-months-when-will-this-madness-stop https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/cameras/memory-cards/memo...
- geerlingguy 7mo agoSony stopped making their cards entirely, which stinks because I'd settled on their pro cards for all my camera bodies.
- tempest_ 7mo agoWe just had a vendor tell us none of the HDDs we were looking for were available unless we also committed to a full NAS offering.
- cyanydeez 7mo ago
- dangus 7mo ago“Killing” is strong phrasing. Yes, a $250 mini PC I bought last year is now $350. Is this pricing bad? Yeah, compared to what it was. Is this the end of the world? Not really, and we’ve seen price spikes for all kinds of PC components in the past. It’s rarely permanent.
- SSchick 7mo agoNot everyone earns tech bro salaries and can sustain a thousand cuts. Many hobbiests are scraping and saving money to acquire hardware. For some it very well msy be the end of their world.
- dangus 7mo agoWe are talking about brand new latest gen hardware here. People with low budgets are always scraping and saving for deals and don’t need to buy something brand new from a pricey brand name like raspberry pi. You can still jump on eBay and buy all kinds of dirt cheap used pieces of hardware. My buddy just bought a used ThinkPad T14 with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for about $500. You can get by with a whole lot less. In this context, I will also present the idea that Rasperry Pi has represented quite poor cost value for many years now.
- ciupicri 7mo agoThat cheap stuff from eBay that people talk about all the time seems to be available only in North America, or in the best case Western Europe. ThinkPad T14 which generation?
- homebrewer 7mo agoYes, 90%+ of sellers refuse to ship here (and we're not even under any sanctions and/or political pressure of any sort). I hear about these magical 100$ Thinkpads all the time; I'm yet to see anything cheaper than 300$ (add another 100$+ for shipping).
- Marsymars 7mo ago
- einpoklum 7mo agoThe title should say: "Collusion of large corporations promoting LLMs with RAM manufacturers is killing the hobbyist SBC market (and bankrupting anybody trying to get a PC or laptop)". Because we all know that DRAM prices have spiked since production is going to those infernal chatbot training data centers. Same as a lot of the electricity in some parts of the world, BTW.
- Permit 7mo agoCan you elaborate on the collusion aspect? Is the implication that OpenAI and Anthropic are coordinating their purchases in such a way that they target the hobbyist market? What’s the collusion angle here?
- throwaway85825 7mo agoOpenAI signed letters of intent for 40% of the DRAM supply because they have no moat and want to starve their competition.
- zozbot234 7mo agoExcept that it doesn't work like that. If you buy DRAM and don't do anything genuinely worthwhile with it, you'll ultimately dump it all right back onto the market, and everyone knows that. The biggest worry is that it's actually OpenAI and their direct competition starving the rest of the market because they predict AI research and the like to be a highly valued use for the stuff, compared to building gaming PC battlestations or whatever the highest-valued use was before. Many observers think that this will also happen with GPUs and cutting-edge digital logic more generally.
- pixl97 7mo agoOnly works so long as you eventually pay up... well unless the manufacturers make too much this way. That said are there some Chinese manufacturers that aren't part of the cabal and could undercut them?
- neonstatic 7mo ago
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- elwebmaster 7mo agoIt's terrible. Fake money is fueling the exhaustion of real resources in search of questionable outcomes ("AGI"). Imagine if all of these money were invested in curing cancer.
- mhb 7mo agoImagine if AI cures cancer.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- squidsoup 7mo agoYou can imagine all you want, but my understanding is there is no credible evidence that scaling LLMs will result in true AGI.
- mhb 7mo agoObviously there's no "evidence". Why would you even think we need AGI? But I'm happy to hear your reasoning if you were one of the few/only? people who imagined that software that could predict the next word could do what it now is doing.
- elwebmaster 7mo agoYou don't have to imagine, it will hallucinate you a slop with full confidence every time.
- duskwuff 7mo agoI've already seen at least one person who was pretty sure that the preprint paper they co-authored with AI (read: AI wrote for them) was going to cure cancer and make them billions of dollars. There was only one problem. The paper jumped straight from "this paper will show how our new treatment could cures cancer forever" to "as you can see, these results clearly show that our treatment cures cancer" - with neither any actual results nor any specifics on the treatment. And I don't just mean that the paper didn't go into details; writing the paper was the full extent of their "research".
- michaelt 7mo ago> The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99. Meanwhile, a refurbished corporate laptop with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD can be yours for $199 [1] I'm sure there will still be people who want the Pi 5 but at these prices, I ain't one of them. [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/327079631563 https://www.ebay.com/itm/327079631563
- tempest_ 7mo agoThose will dry up soon enough. Corporate laptop refreshes will be drawn out as they try and cost save on the increased price. You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM out of those things because they will start harvesting it for sure if there is money to made.
- zozbot234 7mo agoFor most older laptops it's easy enough, you just open them up and take the RAM sticks out. There are SO-DIMM to DIMM adapters to fit a laptop memory stick in a DIMM socket.
- tredre3 7mo ago> Those will dry up soon enough. We're talking about a pi replacement. The Pi 5 is slower than a 10yo laptop. That's gives us a very vast pool of used laptops. > You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM That is a real worry and I can see used machines being gutted because selling DDR3/4/5 sticks is way easier and profitable than the whole machine. Adapters for SODIMM to regular DIMM are readily available and cheap, too.
- bombcar 7mo agoThe EDU Neo is $500, too bad it’s not as versatile.
- Lord_Zero 7mo agoWhat is the edu neo
- Venn1 7mo agoIs there anything (technically) preventing SBC manufacturers adding SODIMM slots? I was expecting the Milk V Titan to avoid this memory nonsense since it has two unpopulated DDR4 slots, but it has fallen off the radar like several other SBCs.
- tempest_ 7mo agoDDR4 is also crazy expensive right now so this just depends on you having some around from a previous build
- zozbot234 7mo agoIt actually seems to be slightly less expensive than DDR5, perhaps due to the lower throughput that makes it uncompetitive for AI-adjacent workloads.
- deltoidmaximus 7mo agoIf you're willing to check the used market it is more affordable as the spike isn't as severe as used DDR5.
- murderfs 7mo agoSODIMMs are huge compared to a BGA memory package which is a problem if your goal is to minimize your board size (e.g. I don't think there's a reasonable way to fit it into a Raspberry Pi form factor without something weird and expensive like a mezzanine connector). Routing the signals is also somewhat more annoying because they all come out of one edge of the connector compared to a BGA package which has them fan out in every direction, giving more space for length matching traces, etc. You'll likely need additional PCB layers compared to a BGA chip.
- Lwrless 7mo agoGot my RPi 5 16GB quite a while ago for around $160 and already thought that was expensive... It’s still powerful enough for almost everything I throw at it, honestly a bit overkill in most scenarios. With prices steadily going up, for me it's starting to feel more sensible to repurpose the RAM sticks I've collected from old PC builds / laptops and just throw together small amd64 boxes instead of buying more RPis.
- jorvi 7mo agoI wonder if there are low power Intel or AMD boards that accept DDR3. So many sticks of 2 / 4 / 8GB DDR3 inside laptops going into recycling or landfills which would do perfectly fine for low power purposes. Hell, performance for standard workloads scales with access times, not bandwidth, and DDR3 sits nicely at CAS8 1600MHz and CAS10 2133MHz..
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- kasabali 7mo agoDell Optiplex 3040 or some configurations of Lenovo M700 may be using 6th gen Intel CPU with DDR3.
- JollySharp0 7mo agoThere are ups and downs in the prices of components. Often people forget that during COVID prices were high for SBCs because of supply chain issues. Video cards just were not available in the UK and afterwards (every supplier had long lead times) and are still relatively expensive (at least there are now lower priced options). Raspberry Pis you couldn't get hold of and many people (Jeff Included) was using a website checking for availability which was non-existent for anything other than low end models. I remember 15-20 years ago when hard drive prices went up through the roof because there was a flood in Thailand and it too years for prices to come down. There is going to be supply chain issues due to the current Geopolitical situation (Helium comes out of the Gulf and that is need in chip manufacture) is also going to affect the price of components. Eventually in a few years (as the article states) the situation will change. It just sucks at the moment. TBH I am more worried about my ability to fill up the tank on my car as both Petrol and Diesel is unavailable locally. I can make do with whatever computer equipment I have.
- zozbot234 7mo ago> People are quick to forget that during COVID prices were high for SBCs because of supply chain issues. inb4 AI has the same supply chain effects as a worldwide pandemic. I guess those AI doomers that talked about it being the end of the world had it right!
- JollySharp0 7mo agoDoomers IMO are just click baiting. There is a saying that is often trotted out my economists "That the cure for high prices, is high prices". There is a consumer market and business need for DRAM outside of AI. Someone will fulfil the need as there is a high incentive to. It just going to take a bit of time for this to happen. My equipment is going to be fine for another few years. So I am going to just hang tight and make do with what I got for now.
- dwattttt 7mo ago> Someone will fulfil the need as there is a high incentive to And those uses which fall short of the new threshold, e.g. hobbyist SBCs, slowly fall away.
- contextfree 7mo agowhat are the barriers to new DRAM supply coming online?
- bombcar 7mo agoHuge capital outlays and no guarantee the prices stay high.
- Nasrudith 7mo agoIt would be sort of odd for computer parts historically to do so? but that sounds like a job for a futures contract.
- dghlsakjg 7mo agoStartup costs measured in the billions, with no guarantee of success, and a long payback time horizon in a market that almost everyone thinks is - in one way or another - a bubble. Oh yeah, the market is also getting intense scrutiny from powerful geopolitical entities that are quite explicit that they don't believe in fair play or consistent, stable rules. Would you place that bet?
- adrian_b 7mo agoThe barriers are the US demands that nobody should sell semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China. Otherwise their memory manufacturing companies would be happy to exploit this opportunity. Actually some Chinese companies already sell cheap DDR5 memory modules, but their production capacity is severely limited by the US blockade, so the cheap memories are available in few places, mainly in Asia. So the high memory prices are caused by USA both by the AI companies that have bought most of the existing production and by the US government, who has sabotaged the Chinese memory vendors since a couple of years ago, in order to protect the market share of Micron (the US sanctions coincided with the moment when several companies, including Apple, intended to use the cheaper Chinese memories, so preventing this to happen seems a much more likely reason for the "sanctions" than the BS excuse that consumer DDR DIMMs and SSDs are dual-use products that may benefit the military. Even if that were true, the US sanctions did not prevent at all the Chinese from producing anything that would be needed in a small quantity, like for a military application. The sanctions have prevented only the mass production of devices using state-of-the-art lithography, which would have impacted the prices in consumer markets).
- esskay 7mo agoThe SBC markets been on life support for a long time. Youtubers making videos about them don't seem to grasp that and keep pumping out reviews and projects like its still 2019. The pi specifically has plummeted in popularity and for most use cases they just aren't a cost effective option when second hand micro pcs are dirt cheap and vastly more capable.
- msgilligan 7mo agoI don't think comparing new Pis to used micro pcs is fair. Compare a _used_ Pi with a used micro pc. If you have any geek friends, it's probably not hard to find a used Pi for free.
- throwaway85825 7mo agoPCs don't have GPIO. They're different markets and the desktop replacement never materialized.
- bluescrn 7mo agoFor most projects using GPIO, a <$10 ESP32 board or Arduino clone will suffice
- throwaway85825 7mo agoMCUs are great but a lot of projects require linux and an application processor. Pi is the industrial standard.
- adrian_b 7mo agoYou get GPIO and any other needed interfaces on any PC, by adding a $10 microcontroller on a USB port, e.g. one of the STM Nucleo boards. If you use a PC or mini-PC that you already have, that is much cheaper than using a Raspberry Pi or similar.
- esskay 7mo ago1. Most people aren't using GPIO. 2. If you are as others said, you can get very cheap GPIO addons.
- Havoc 7mo agoBought a couple of 32gb SBCs before this all hit the fan. And also built a SSD NAS before the wave hit. So timed that all pretty great. What worries me is my desktop is up for a full new buy somewhere around early '28. That could be a train wreck depending on how taiwan situation goes
- stuxnet79 7mo ago> So timed that all pretty great. What worries me is my desktop is up for a full new buy somewhere around early '28 That's a very specific date / timeline. How do you decide to do a full new buy? I ask because I own a desktop that I built 15 years ago which I was flirting with replacing completely last year, but unfortunately I didn't pull the trigger ... oops :( My old rig is still going strong. The motherboard can only take up to 32GB DDR3 though. CPU is an Intel i7-4790k which is still very fair today if you are not running a resource hog OS (looking at you Windows). Overall it is completely serviceable for my needs. Being honest with myself the only reason I wanted to upgrade was for nerd cred but I don't game much anymore and don't do any ML tasks that require lots of local compute.
- globular-toast 7mo agoMy PC is similar. I upgraded it to a 4790k a few years ago (best CPU on the socket). What's funny is I also maxed out the RAM as well because I realised two more 8GiB sticks were like £30 so why not. I thought it was a funny thing to do at the time as I didn't really need that much, but glad I did now. It's going to have to do me for many more years to come, but I'm fine with that. I don't game at all. Just have to hope nothing fails. I did build it with solid foundations: good and overprovisioned PSU, Asus mobo, so here's hoping. Unfortunately I do also have server gear now as well. I'm going to have to really think about what I actually need now...
- Havoc 7mo ago>That's a very specific date / timeline. It's aimed at roughly hitting Zen 6 and switching to high refresh rate 4K gaming. Was really hoping I could hop to ddr6 and pcie 6 too, but that seems less plausible >How do you decide to do a full new buy? Gut feel, it's a 2019 build that had a mid life refresh so 2028 is near a decade, which for a gaming rig is good going. Gaming also means a big VRAM GPU makes sense for toying with LLMs because I get dual use out of it. Plus I don't think the 3090 much as I like it will drive 4K high refresh. ...If it wasn't for gaming I could definite keep this rig till 2030+. It's comically overspec'd for browsing and casual dev stuff. Hell it's even got an optane boot drive so that'll last till the end of time
- rtpg 7mo agoam I crazy for thinking that the 16GB Pi 5 is just there to absorb money from people who purchase the most expensive version of things? Like really nobody needs that much RAM on a Pi?
- throwaway85825 7mo agoMost Pis are sold for embedded customers, some of which no doubt can use 16gb.
- teaearlgraycold 7mo agoIt’s an incredibly lopsided machine. The Pi 5 is decently powerful, but you really really should not be attempting to use one as a desktop replacement. While theoretically possible you are so much better off with a $50 used SFF PC.
- mghackerlady 7mo agoI bought the pi 500+, it fit my requirement of being built into the keyboard
- parl_match 7mo agoYes, you are crazy for thinking that. The extra ram is useful for small LLMs and also running lots of dock containers. The very low power consumption makes it ideal for a low end home server. I use the 16GB SKU to host a bunch of containers and some light debugging tools, and the power usage that sips at idle will probably pay for the whole board over my previous home server, within about 5 years.
- bashtoni 7mo agoHelium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.
- pixl97 7mo agoI expect my 5 year old desktop will last a lot longer, but start worrying about the bathtub curve.
- andrewstuart2 7mo agoFinally, good efficient code is going to get its moment to shine! Which will totally happen because it's not like 80% of the industry is vibe coding everything, right?
- hombre_fatal 7mo agoVibe coding might be a positive here since there's no need to optimize for DX over perf when the clanker is the one reading/writing code.
- jaggederest 7mo agoThis is my theory: we're going to see a lot of languages with straightforward and obvious semantics, high guard rails, terrible dx, and great memory allocation and performance behavior out of the box. Assembler or worse, but with extremely strong typing bolted on in a way that no human would ever tolerate, basically, something in that vibe.
- Grosvenor 7mo agoSo Pascal and Delphi are coming back? I'm actually cool with that.
- jaggederest 7mo ago
- Aurornis 7mo agoThe extreme DRAM market has had an unexpected side effect of triggering a lot of panic buying. I know several people who delayed PC upgrades for years but then panic bought new systems in this market. The trigger was seeing all of the "It's only going to get worse" and "This is the end of personal computing" headlines. They're already regretting spending so much now that prices have started to tick downward. I keep telling everyone: If you don't have a pressing need to buy right now, please wait 6 months and check again.
- jonhohle 7mo agoWhat’s interesting is mini pcs are dirt cheap. The RAM for them costs as much or more than a barebones Ryzen 7 mini pc.
- adrian_b 7mo agoIn January I bought a barebone ASUS NUC, which is relatively expensive among mini-PCs, but I need to run it 24/7 for many years, so I made a choice based on expected reliability. After adding to it DRAM and SSDs, the cost of the barebone remained of only 40% of the total, so the price of the memories was 50% higher than the barebone computer. At that time, the memories were still cheaper than today, so now the price ratio would be even worse. (The barebone NUC had an Intel Arrow Lake H CPU and it cost $500, while 32 GB DDR5 + 3 TB SSDs cost $750.)
- zozbot234 7mo agoThat's actually a reasonable response to market volatility and illiquidity. It's not just high prices, but prices that still fail to be representative of the actual market stance despite the rises.
- Aurornis 7mo agoIt's not a reasonable response. If you don't need a PC right now, buying in the middle of a demand spike is the worst time to do it.
- roughly 7mo agoWe're somehow in a race between LLMs curing cancer, destroying the planet by "You're right to be mad, I shouldn't have issued those launch codes, it's even in my Claude.md file, I'm sorry," and rendering modern technological civilization uneconomical. I know this is statistically the best time in history to live, but lord, I could use a vacation.
- platevoltage 7mo agoIt’s great that everything I love is getting ruined so that the most mediocre people on earth can generate slop on a daily basis.
- lm411 7mo agoYep. I just bought a Pi CM5 for my son, for his ClockworkPi uConsole. CAD $200 for the 8GB module. I bought a whole Pi5 16GB not long ago for under CAD $200. I will not be buying any more SBC's at this price point. I wonder if Raspberry PI will survive.
- megous 7mo agoSBCs are not just RPis. Other brands can still be bought cheaper.
- geerlingguy 7mo agoA few, until their current stocks run out. Orange Pi already increased prices (their boards are similar price or more expensive than equivalent Pi's now), and Radxa seems to just stop selling certain models (at least in NA) once they run out of stock. Arduino has one of the cheapest 4GB boards now, but I wonder if it's just because they made a ton and the demand for their strange board has been low?
- megous 7mo ago8GiB Rpi 4B is 190 USD where I am 8GiB Opi 4 is 90 USD from aliexpress to where I am https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010198492129.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010198492129.html
- observationist 7mo agoApple and Sama didn't do the consumers any favors this year.
- 3abiton 7mo agoWhat did Apple do?
- observationist 7mo agoGrabbed up as much ram as they could, nearly no questions asked, at above market rates in some cases, ramping up the perceived demand and decreasing supply significantly.
- jl6 7mo agoTime to break out the Small Web protocols and start living within our means!
- SV_BubbleTime 7mo agoSorry, best I can do is coal powered datacenter vibe coding.
- walrus01 7mo agoUnless you're really using the GPIO pins or other weird I/O, I really fail to see the purpose in having an 8GB or 16GB RAM Raspberry Pi (at a much higher price than it used to be) as a desktop workstation with a GUI on it. The idea of putting sixteen gigs of RAM in a raspberry pi is nuts. The legit thing you want to use a raspberry pi (or a competitor) for as an embedded headless thing with no KB/mouse/display attached should run fine in 2GB of RAM or less, assuming an ordinary debian-based OS environment. I would much rather have a used, ex-corporate/ex-lease, small form factor or ultra small form factor x86-64 desktop PC (Dell, HP, Lenovo, whatever) with 16GB of RAM in it and an SSD on a SATA3 or NVME interface. Whatever is the "best" SFF that you can buy via huge eBay used equipment dealers on any given month. Despite being many years old, whatever you can buy on ebay for 200 bucks (at least before the recent RAM fiasco) with some recent-ish quad core core i5/i7 or Ryzen in it will run circles around a raspberry pi 5.
- Rapzid 7mo agoHigh speed NVME is soaring too. Some popular Samsung kits are up 3X compared to 12 months ago.
- fortran77 7mo agoMy PDP-11 runs fine on 512K
- BizarroLand 7mo agoI bet the power draw is at least 50x though
- culi 7mo agoDoes anyone mind explaining why the 2GB model only increased by 20% in price while the 16GB model nearly tripled in price?
- gbgarbeb 7mo agoThe 16GB model has eight times more ram?
- dghlsakjg 7mo agoThe main cost input is presumably ram. They are passing it through. If everything on the board but the ram costs $30, and ram is going from $10/gb to $20/gb, then they have to change the price $50 -> $70 to break even on the 2gb board, and $190 -> $350 for the 16gb board. In other words, the raspi is now priced like a stick of ram with a bonus computer attached because ram is massively more expensive than the rest of the computer.
- qmr 7mo agoDoes this mean the Atom 8GB boxes I have laying about are now more valuable?
- rtaylorgarlock 7mo agoAm I allowed to complain about this or do I have to get my VC's approval first
- rtaylorgarlock 6mo agodawwww poor hn user's are afraid of their VC's Imagine disliking an analysis which favors smaller users. Before i ever commented on a single HN post, I was told repeatedly how cynical, negative, and sarcastic HN was. Hm.
- ktokw 7mo agoIt's not easy to do hobbies.. I keep needing more money..
- nl 7mo agoIn the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices: But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1 billion. Our projections are that we might drop to 800 million this year, and down to 500 or 600 million next year. We look at data points out of China from some of our analysts in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They’ve been tracking this, and they see Xiaomi and Oppo cutting low-end and mid-range smartphone volumes by half. Yes, it’s only a $150 BOM increase on a $1,000 iPhone where Apple has some larger margin. But for smaller phones, the percentage of the BOM that goes to memory and storage is much larger. And the margins are lower, so there’s less capacity to even eat the margins. And they have also generally tended not to do long-term agreements on memory. Why this is a big deal is that if smartphone volumes halve, that drop will happen in the low and mid-range, not the high end.
- zozbot234 7mo agoSmartphones are widely available on the used goods market though, perhaps even more so than second-hand SBCs or old PCs. The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.
- ethbr1 7mo ago> The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end. With the 4-7 year support window on Android? Maybe that's why Google is trying to kill off Graphene et al.
- TheScaryOne 7mo agoMy Samsung Galaxy S3 died after 8 years. EMMC failure. Just started boot looping while I was asleep. Everything gone. Known issue. My Samsung Galaxy S8 died at 7 years. Some kind of thermal failure, I was able to recover my data by keeping the phone in the freezer while I copied. Known issue. My Samsung Galaxy S21? I figure I've got another year or two in it before it, too, dies. Having beautiful dead phones that have never had a broken screen or a hard drop is pretty depressing.
- tonymet 7mo agoThis is a good thing. Pis were priced too low for OEMs and too high for hobby work. It's no longer an accessible board for fledgling hackers . Reclaim hardware for your nephews, which is good for the environment, too.
- didgetmaster 7mo agoHow spoiled we have become... I remember my company buying RAM expansion boards for our PCs back in 1989 so we could run OS/2. The 4MB boards (MB! Not GB.) cost around $2000 at the time. Like everyone, I love getting tons of RAM or SSD storage on the cheap; but we have a ways to go before we reach the 'unaffordable' level.
- ValidateKorea 7mo agoLiving in Korea where Samsung and SK Hynix are headquartered, the DRAM pricing situation is interesting from the supply side too. Both companies have been aggressively shifting capacity toward HBM for AI/datacenter use because the margins are 3-5x higher than commodity DDR5. The hobbyist SBC market is essentially collateral damage of the AI boom — manufacturers are rationally choosing to serve the more profitable customer. Unfortunately I don't see this reversing until HBM demand plateaus or new fabs come online, which is 2-3 years out at minimum.
- WaterRun 7mo ago[dead]
- adjejmxbdjdn 7mo agoI know this is a pipe dream (govt’s of the world working together to benefit their citizens instead of blowing some other country’s citizens up!) but if we aren’t gonna regulate AI collectively to ensure we are developing it responsibly, the least we can do is ensure AI is given bottom billing when it comes to all the resources it’s sucking up. Energy, components, engineers, construction, etc. My preference is responsible AI development which prevents it from turning into an arms race but that’s clearly not on the cards, especially with current leadership.
- semiquaver 7mo agoI think the least we can do is even less than that.
- mghackerlady 7mo agoI wish korea or the US could pass a law requiring samsung/sk hynix or micron to allocate a certain amount of their production for consumer use
- fleventynine 7mo agoMost software uses 10x more memory than is necessary to solve the problem. In an ideal world, developers would stop building bloatware if their customers can't afford the DRAM.
- matt-p 7mo agoI agree, OTOH there are many very cool things that we can build if we're able to assume a user can spare 2GB of RAM that we'd otherwise have to avoid entirely like 3D scenes with Three.js, in-browser video/photo editing. Should be making sure that extra memory is enabling genuinely richer functionality, not just compensating for developer laziness (fewer excuses now than ever for that).
- alcor-z 7mo ago[dead]
- thelastgallon 7mo agoWhat is SBC? Session Border Controller? Small Business Consumer?
- josegonzalez 7mo agoSingle Board Computing.
- Waterluvian 7mo agoIf I spent a bajillion dollars on massive data centres I would be delighted if personal computing were also crippled for a while. It would allow me to further own your ability to do compute tasks and to help kill the concept of doing it yourself for a while.
- brandnewideas 7mo agoCrippling personal computing isn't a side-effect of massive investments in data centers, but rather one of the primary drivers for it.
- Nasrudith 7mo agoBeen hacking Sam Altman's inbox lately? Seriously how the hell could you actually know that instead of just assuming they are evil as possible?
- cloudfixer_dev 7mo ago[dead]
- DoctorOetker 7mo ago> memory prices won’t remain at their current very high level indefinitely; the circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future they will abate. how long does it take to increase manufacturing capacity? how long will the decision be postponed to increase manufacturing capacity? if AI skeptics are right and the bubble bursts, increasing capacity inordinately will prove a big mistake. if AI skeptics are wrong delaying increase of capacity indordinately will prove a big mistake. In a sense we are forcing DRAM manufacturers to play the judge, jury and executioner: If they don't increase capacity corresponding with AI boom, the DRAM prices may ultimately cause an AI winter. If they do increase capacity (lowering per unit costs), the lower DRAM prices may enable AI summer to continue. This looks like self-fulfilling prophecy scenario.
- ghm2199 7mo agoPeople hate AI. This will make them hate it even more. Yet somehow the market has convinced/forced us to use their products even though we might not want to. A recent nationwide poll[1] shows AI has a poorer approval rating than ICE — ICE! — probably due to their overlords being "those" SV types. Everyday AI features are being shoved down our throats. I can't even choose to not install Gemini related apps on my Android when I select "which apps to install" when booting a new phone. But people are a weird bunch. They largely don't buy products aligning with their values. No one is jumping up and down for Graphene phones even if they had amazing privacy first software. People buy 6mi/gal hummers and iPhones for fashion, brand, money, convenience/function. The pain threshold of all bad effects still is not high enough to quit their products in a meaningful way. Values and privacy are way down in their list. I wish people would not buy/install AI related features by big tech and be more discerning, but that is likely a pipe dream. [1] https://pos.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/260072-NBC-March-2026-Poll-03-08-2026-Release.pdf https://pos.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/260072-NBC-March-...
- freetime2 7mo agoJust checked my Amazon history, and in late 2020 I bought two Raspberry Pi 4s with 4GB memory for ¥6,500 JPY (~$62 USD) each. At the time, they were in somewhat short supply and I payed a little over the $55 list price from a reseller on Amazon. It looks like the current price on Amazon for the Raspberry Pi 4 4GB is ¥18,800 (~$117 at current rates), which is indeed expensive AF. Oddly, the Raspberry Pi 5 4GB is priced about the same, at ¥18,950 (~$119). Considering inflation and the speed increases over the 4, the Raspberry Pi 5 price doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. But having the price go up well over ¥10,000 definitely takes it out of the realm of impulse buy and more into something I would only buy if I had a specific and urgent need. So I can definitely see this killing off a good chunk of the hobbyist market. As it stands, my two older Pis are currently sitting unused in a closet, so I would definitely try to use those before buying anything new. My big regret at the moment is not buying a 4TB M.2 SSD last year when prices were dipping down below ¥30,000. Now they have more than doubled to ¥65,000 or more. I had one in my cart, but decided not to buy it with the rationale that "well I still don't need the space right now, and the price per TB will probably come down even further by the time I do need it". That is, after all, the way that prices on computer component have worked for most of my life.
- MBCook 7mo agoI bought a pair of 4 TB SSDs for like $300-350/ea two years ago. I don’t remember exactly. Around Christmas I tried to order one more. They wanted to above MSRP, like $500. Given the price of everything else I decided to just bite the bullet and do it. After about a month they canceled my order. Whether that’s because they didn’t actually have one and couldn’t get one, or because they just wanted to wait for the prices to go up further I don’t know. I went looking again two weeks ago. The exact same drive is back in stock. MSRP is now $1000. Amazon has it “on sale” for $900. Other retailers that often have slightly higher prices are asking $1250. That’s 3-4x price increase in 2 years.
- nerdix 7mo agoI built a new desktop in 2023 and repurposed my old desktop for my daughter. The old desktop had a couple of smaller SSDs so I swapped them out for a 2TB Samsung SSD. Paid $99 on Amazon. The exact same SSD is $479 on Amazon today. It's not a fancy super fast NVMe. It's a slow SATA drive. I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated.
- Caum 7mo ago[flagged]
- queenkjuul 7mo agoIt's good that openAI is failing to meet its obligations on hardware, but given what we know about the DRAM industry, i suspect drastically higher prices will be the permanent new normal, just like most everything else. I've been having fun getting Linux 7.0 running on my Milk-V Duo S, it's still available super cheap (though tariffs make buying single quantities expensive) so i stocked up on Duo boards. I guess I'm hoping for an upside where there's more interest in cheaper overstock boards from 2022+
- imrozim 7mo ago[flagged]
- nullbyte808 7mo agoI wonder if the vale of Pixel phones that run GrapheneOS will rise dramatically?
- lexcamisa 7mo agobeen building a home server recently and the ram prices really caught me off guard. 32gb kits are almost double what they were last year
- 0xbadcafebee 7mo agoThe Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB is $55 on CanaKit, PiShop, Seeed Studio, and MicroCenter. The Raspberry Pi 3B 1GB is $35 on CanaKit, Adafruit. The 3B+ is on PiShop for $40. The Raspberry Pi 3A+ 512MB is $25 on CanaKit, Adafruit, PiShop, SparkFun. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is $16.35 on CanaKit, $17.25 on PiShop. We are unavoidably headed at financial collapse, authoritarianism, and potentially the collapse of Western civilization. And ya'll are worried that you won't have 8GB of RAM in an embedded GPIO computer for your hobby? Maybe it's time to make the ultimate sacrifice: use less RAM.
- ivolimmen 7mo agoMaybe it will even trigger that we software developers get more time to optimize our RAM usage while developing instead of implementing that new user tracking feature that is being pushed by the business...
- foobarian 7mo agoI picture a scene with Richard Crenna knocking on our old fogey's cabin door to ask us to come out of retirement and help hand-optimize software in this new environment
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- romaniv 7mo ago> use less RAM. The same accounts that defended and promoted LLM use just a few weeks ago are now telling RPi users to use less RAM.
- tripdout 7mo agoA 2GB RAM (and no EMMC) Raspberry Pi 5 in Canada is $90. Around $150 is where you can get used N100 Mini PCs with a proper SSD, and at least 8GB of RAM. It’s crazy.
- vincnetas 7mo agoWell this brings back initiative to stop throwing RAM at the problem and start optimising the code. Would like to see what smart people can do when there are money saved from buying more RAM.
- dehrmann 7mo agoFor some uses right now, this makes sense, but it has to be at scale. If you're working on something that will ship in two years and is used by end users, it might not be worth the effort since production will catch up.
- reliabilityguy 7mo ago> it might not be worth the effort since production will catch up. Sounds unlikely. Unless RAM use would impact financial metrics, it would be hard to justify the work on memory footprint if customer doesn’t complain a lot.
- ahoka 7mo agoThe whole point was to kill personal computing.
- a3w 7mo agoDuckduckgo did not help me with "SBC meaning". Here, no help either. Guess I am asking an LLM next, which I hate.
- ranguna 7mo agoSingle Board Computer
- mcc1ane 7mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer
- rob74 7mo agoSingle Board Computer. Yes, it might help to explain such acronyms in the article. And yes, if you think the name is slightly misleading, I agree: most PC mainboards today are also "single board computers" - you don't have to add any additional cards to get a functional PC (unless you consider RAM modules and M.2 SSDs cards).
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- szszrk 7mo agoMaybe you should have search for "SBC abbreviation" instead, as it's not exactly a philosophical question. It's a TLA (spoiler: TLA stands for Three Letter Acronym). SBC (single board computer) is a fairly widely used term.
- ghaff 7mo agoFunnily enough the consumer impact of DRAM etc. costs came up in an unrelated interview I was doing at Kubecon last week. She also made the observation that a lot of these big companies are buying components to keep in reserve for data centers that haven’t even been built yet.
- DevCrate 7mo ago[dead]
- Rochus 7mo agoMy migration from the Oberon System 3 to the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 comes at just the right time as it seems (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3Native/releases/tag/2026-04-02 https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3Native/release...). There is also a stand-alone version of the compiler that runs on all standard systems (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/op2/ https://github.com/rochus-keller/op2/). Maybe the company will extend the availability of the Model 2b for a few more years and release versions with less RAM (<= 500 MB)?
- djhworld 7mo agothis whole saga is having ripple effects even in the second hand market. in 2020-2022 there was a glut of those 1L mini pcs on ebay and other resellers which were WAY better value than the RPi4 at the time which was in short supply due to COVID. these mini PCs were pretty affordable and could be upgraded with extra RAM, new SSD/NVMe drive etc to make perfectly good little home servers. I still have mine which has been running for a few years now, Intel 6th Gen CPU, Lenovo thinkcentre. nowadays the price of these 2nd hand mini PCs has shot up, and even if you do get a chance to get one, upgrading it with more RAM is gonna be painful
- zozbot234 7mo agoIf you can't find mini pc's at a resaonable price, there's always old enterprise SFF desktops or even thin clients, which have very low specs (and are usually not upgradable) but can be loaded with a custom lightweight OS.
- GnarfGnarf 7mo agoSBC = Single Board Computing Betriebsblind
- devy 7mo agoThe high cost of high end DRAM (4GB+) cost skyrocketing has caused some interesting shifts: 1. Shifting Hobbyist Focus: Because hobbyists typically prefer parts under the $100 mark (so they don't "fret over breaking them"), the community is shifting away from modern, high-powered SBCs. Instead, people are moving toward: 2. Older SBC models (like the Pi 3 or 4 with lower RAM). 3. Microcontrollers (like the RP2040) which remain cheap. So Used hardware and "repurposing" old tech is retro trending again. IMO, perhaps there will be push to make software/firmware more RAM efficient with AI assisted coding?
- mghackerlady 7mo agoI'm happy I picked up my Pi 500+ last week. Lovely little computer for $250, not so much $400
- arafeq 7mo ago[flagged]
- devnotes77 7mo ago[dead]
- ge96 7mo agoBought these Patriod SSDs recently, they are cheap but they are DRAMless apparently, I'm using them to replace the HDDs from 17 year old hardware so figure it's not terrible plus the read/write speed is still high
- classified 7mo agoThe market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent. I'm holding on to the hardware that I have.
- 827a 7mo agoWe need to come to terms with the possibly-irreparable harm that private capital has done to the West. Capital is long-past serving the interests of the broader public; but we're now past the point of capital serving the interests of the corporations its being invested into. The demand for shares in OpenAI and Anthropic is so high that its pushing their valuations into territories they can never hope to drive revenue to fulfill; the cycle of this massive warchest of private capital inside the AI industry has for all intents and purposes created a communist economic structure, with all of its faults. Grifting, favored suppliers; if the stories about SK Hynix and Samsung guaranteeing 40% of their wafer supply to OpenAI on a letter of intent they cannot follow through on are true, we're even getting good old fashioned communist mis-allocation of resources. The day may eventually come when the USG is forced with the decision of bailing out the trillion dollar OpenAI Corporation; taking a stake to add to their portfolio next to Intel and others; and maybe normies will then realize what is happening, but the writing has been on the wall for years. I love capitalism; its ability to allocate resources on a macroeconomic scale to pick winners and more-importantly losers doesn't have a rival system. As a younger, more naive startup employee, I'm on the record making a total fool of myself responding to our CEO talking about struggling to find PMF by saying "then maybe our company doesn't deserve to exist" (yeah...) But the "capitalists" who run the world aren't actually interested in capitalism, and thus definitionally can't be capitalists. At least once upon a time we had filthy rich titans you could look up to, like Buffet and Gates (Epstein stuff aside); but at this point most of them aren't even enviable people. Despite being richer than God, people like Huang, Musk, Ellison, and Zuckerberg feel more like vampires; they want to spend their whole lives doing the exact same thing, getting richer and richer, refusing to put a ladder down for anyone else to take a shot at improving on what they've built. I actually have a modicum of respect for Bezos and, to whatever vanishingly small degree, Trump; at least they're trying something different.
- matt-p 7mo agoRaspberry Pi Zero 2 W (512MB) and Pi3B (1G) are both still super cheap if you can cope with that much RAM.
- surcap526 7mo ago[dead]
- emaccumber 7mo agoI purchased a Beelink Mini S12 for $160 in May 2025. It's now selling for $260.
- emaccumber 7mo agoI purchased a Beelink Mini S12 for $160 in May 2025 on Amazon. It's now at $260.
- nijave 7mo agoYeah, mini PCs are quite a bit more expensive. An N100 with 16GB could be had for $135 or sometimes less on sale but is now about $250 In the U.S., some of it was tariffs, though.
- nektro 7mo agothey (collective) started losing the market the moment these went over ~$30. today's increases are disastrous