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Just 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
by freetime2 6mo ago
Just 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 6mo 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 6mo 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.
- MBCook 6mo agoMine were SATA too!
- californical 6mo ago> I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated. I did recently, specifically targeting lower capacities for the components that have been increasing (RAM and storage). It didn’t seem like prices would be going down for a while and I didn’t have a desktop pc otherwise, so just went for it. We’ll see how it all plays out but I don’t think it was a terrible decision, as long as prices stay high for a couple years it still makes sense to just suffer through the increases
- ge96 6mo agoFunny I make cameras around the Pi ecosystem and having 4GB of RAM is pretty overkill, might as well put an LLM on there/vision while you're at it I did think for more basic cameras I'd use a lower spec Pi like 1GB, I use the full pis now for the high resolution DSI displays