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Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
- codingjoe 4mo agoI hate this timeline: How is a Pi marginally cheaper than a Mac Mini?
- MarvinYork 4mo agoWhere do you buy your Mac Minis?
- stackghost 4mo agoCheapest 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.
- sethops1 4mo agoBefore the personal LLM craze you could easily get $400 Mac Minis from Apple's certified refurbished store. I bought two M2 Pros for that price and turned them into Asahi Linux CI machines.
- codingjoe 4mo agoIn Europe, but I didn't realize the 499 one is also history. Even worse :/
- speedgoose 4mo agoAt a store, some stores do have stock. Otherwise apple.com
- mschuster91 4mo agobecause Apple goes in and buys out entire production cycles based on anticipated demand. Most infamously they got a year worth of TSMCs last new node - no one else could have it. Usually, that gamble pays off, sometimes it does not (cough Apple Vision), and in some cases they get so many QC rejects that they can make an entire new product line on (financially) worthless scrap, that's how the MacBook Neo came to be - a bunch of iPhone SoC's that failed binning, I think in GPU cores.
- akman 4mo agoUp ~50% about 2 months ago (4/2026)
- ThrowawayR2 4mo agoEven worse, continued RAM shortages and inflation might actually mean that will have been a good price in a year's time.
- greenavocado 4mo agoEvery day I go to bed praying CXMT hurries the *$!@ up and dumps an ungodly amount of cheap RAM upon global markets
- mschuster91 4mo agoThey 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.
- greenavocado 4mo agoChinese manufacturers are masters of razor thin margins and flooding the market to crush the competition.
- mschuster91 4mo agoIndeed but China doesn't have access to EUV lithography from ASML.
- greenavocado 4mo agoThey will find a way to make something work even without EUV
- jauntywundrkind 4mo agoI 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.
- ge96 4mo agoThat 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
- giobox 4mo agoSimilar 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.
- kube-system 4mo agoJust don't get a Dell server: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-memory-upgrade-32-gb-2rx4-ddr4-rdimm-3200-mt-s-8-gb-base/apd/aa783422/memory https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-memory-upgrade-32-gb-2r...
- ge96 4mo agoHoly f that's crazy. No I only get the Dell optiplex 9100 or whatever plus a cheap 1050ti GPU to play older games with
- greenavocado 4mo agoLMAO what a joke. N100 mini PCs are a hundred dollars less and vastly more capable aside from GPIO.
- happyopossum 4mo agoAn 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.
- greenavocado 4mo agoSorry, you're right, the 16 GB RAM 500 GB SSD N100 is only $50 less. Amazon /dp/B0DBLLGKPK
- giantrobot 4mo agoIncluding 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.
- nekooooo 4mo agowe've lost the plot. this is no longer a hobbyist computer.
- greenavocado 4mo agoSearch Aliexpress for ESP32-C3 Development Board for Arduino
- Levitating 4mo agoSearch arace.tech for Radxa or Milk-V boards.
- daemonologist 4mo agoUnfortunately 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).
- MallocVoidstar 4mo agoAt least get a -C6 if you're trying to replace a Pi with a microcontroller.
- greenavocado 4mo agoESP32-C6 is $6 but ESP32-C3 is $3 )))
- garciasn 4mo agoTwo 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.
- 4mo ago
- havaloc 4mo agoCome 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.
- Levitating 4mo agoYet the Radxa Rock 4d[1] has 4Gb and is selling for 69 dollars. [1]: https://arace.tech/products/radxa-rock-4d https://arace.tech/products/radxa-rock-4d
- xp84 4mo agoFour of those would be $280 though, so this doesn't seem hilariously out of scale with that.
- Levitating 4mo agoBut 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 https://arace.tech/products/radxa-dragon-q8b
- xp84 4mo agoI 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)
- Levitating 4mo ago> 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 https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/index.asp
- honeycrispy 4mo agoThis 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.
- Narishma 4mo agoYou don't need the 16GB model to watch movies, you can do that on the cheapest ones.
- tverbeure 4mo agoYou 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 https://www.ebay.com/itm/185826328888?_skw=hp+t520
- hnlmorg 4mo agoI 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.
- bitcrshr 4mo ago2 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.
- jollyllama 4mo ago"Don't you know there's a war on?"
- Saris 4mo agoI 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.
- Narishma 4mo agoPeople have been saying this for years, yet Raspberry Pis just keep on selling with no trouble.
- schappim 4mo agoRaspberry Pi’s keep selling because the software ecosystem is solid.
- Saris 4mo agoYeah they do keep selling, I wonder though if hobbyist sales have dropped.
- okanat 4mo agoRPis 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.
- 05 4mo agoThere 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.
- xp84 4mo agoThis 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%2016gb&_sacat=0&_from=R40&rt=nc&_udhi=450 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=m1%20macbook%20air%2016...
- agloe_dreams 4mo agoFor what it is worth, an M4 mac mini is also like 30-50x faster. Like, legitimately.
- duskwuff 4mo ago> 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?baseline=21773016 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/24356484?baseli...
- baq 4mo agoMacBook 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.
- steve_adams_86 4mo agoSo 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.
- manbash 4mo agoA lot of computer parts can be sold at a high profit nowadays.
- dd8601fn 4mo agoI'm still surprised that cryptocurrency fucking the GPU market was just a warm-up for the real supply chain shortages.
- XCSme 4mo agoGood 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...
- scheme271 4mo agoI 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
- ssl-3 4mo agoYep. 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.)
- chrissnell 4mo agoMy 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.
- xnyan 4mo ago> 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.
- teh_klev 4mo ago> 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.
- serf 4mo agoit'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.
- bityard 4mo agoHow much power does that cluster consume?
- esskay 4mo agoSimilar 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
- schappim 4mo agoSome 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/ https://au.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ 2. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/a-new-3gb-raspberry-pi-4-for-83-75-and-more-memory-driven-price-increases/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/a-new-3gb-raspberry-pi-4-fo...
- justin66 4mo agoMicrocenter doubled the price of the 500+ kit shortly after I bought one. Still $90 cheaper than Adafruit, unsurprisingly.
- schappim 4mo agoYou'd have to imagine that the 500+ Kit's cost of goods is impacted twice, first on memory and again on solid state storage.
- alsetmusic 4mo agoI 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.
- throwaway2037 4mo ago> unsurprisingly I'm unsure what is meant here. Does Microcenter usually have very cheap prices, or the opposite for Adafruit?
- gunalx 4mo agoAdafruit is mostly on the expensive side.
- 4mo ago
- jadar 4mo agoHoly cow. I know I'm not supposed to be surprised given the memory shortage, but that is insane level.
- retired 4mo agoI’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?
- CDRdude 4mo agoI 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.
- retired 4mo agoInteresting. 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.
- ssl-3 4mo agoA 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.
- forty 4mo agoLooks like all the USB-A devices purchased over the past 30 years have not been trashed and some people still use them.
- retired 4mo agoUnderstandable 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.
- schappim 4mo agoAre Raspberry Pis (UK country of origin) exempt from the 10% baseline import tariff?
- bsimpson 4mo agoAre they actually made in the UK? I'd presume they're shipped from China like most tech goods.
- MallocVoidstar 4mo agoSome are made in China and Japan, most are made in Wales. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-raspberry-pis-are-made-factory-tour/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-raspberry-pis-are...
- ahartmetz 4mo agoThey actually have a factory in the UK, one that previously made Sony TVs IIRC.
- k4rnaj1k 4mo ago[dead]
- eahm 4mo agoThe $35 computer, for only $350!
- 404mm 4mo agoImagine 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.
- jrflo 4mo agoWho would've thought the $50 pi 5 I bought on a whim would be my best performing asset in the last few years
- Aurornis 4mo agoThe 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.
- throwaway81523 4mo agoThis 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.
- scheme271 4mo agoI 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.
- geerlingguy 4mo ago16GB 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.
- throwaway81523 4mo agoAh 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.
- IshKebab 4mo agoDamn I think I have one in a drawer.
- schappim 4mo agoMicrocenter (another official US reseller) sells the Pi5 16GB at a much lower price[1]. 1. https://www.microcenter.com/product/702590/raspberry-pi-5 https://www.microcenter.com/product/702590/raspberry-pi-5
- rambambram 4mo ago$289, for everybody who doesn't want to click.
- trailbits 4mo agoOnly if you live near a store with it in stock. They aren't shipping that item.
- desireco42 4mo agoPi 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.
- justin66 4mo agoLiterally 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.
- Joel_Mckay 4mo agoOr 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%20100006740%20601183895&Order=1&LeftPriceRange=250+400 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
- dazhbog 4mo agoI got an i5 Thinkpad T480 for 100usd.. Rpi is a joke
- Our_Benefactors 4mo agoThey’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.
- dazhbog 4mo agoAgree, 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..
- dsissitka 4mo agoIt's worth mentioning you're paying a $45 Adafruit tax here. Adafruit charges more for Pis.
- schappim 4mo agoThe US has a plethora of alternative authorised resellers who are lower priced: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/#:~:text=least%20January%202036-,Buy%20Raspberry%20Pi%205,-Select%20a%20model https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/#:~:text...
- shockput26 4mo agopt's therapy bills get expensive fast.
- steveBK123 4mo agoIt'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.
- Aurornis 4mo ago8GB 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.
- yftsui 4mo agoAssume 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.
- rerdavies 4mo agoI'm wondering how "everything just costs twice for exactly the same thing because it's Apple" factors into the equation.
- bigyabai 4mo agoI 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.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- cladopa 4mo agoEvery 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.
- internet2000 4mo agoSooooooo not worth it.
- teaearlgraycold 4mo agoIf you’re on SF I can sell you 16GB Pi 5s for $280. I’ve got a few on hand (new in box).
- tzs 4mo agoIt 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, $120. Clicking the links reveals all the Digi-Key entries are wrong. Their actual price is the same as Pishop (whose rpilocator.com entries seem to be correct).
- shdh 4mo agoHopefully there's a glut in the future
- raffael_de 4mo agoIn August 2025 I bought a Pi 5 (4GB) Official Black Kit for 92 Euro @Welectron. To be fair, it's now sold for "only" 143 Euro. Expected more.
- drchaim 4mo agoi would say my first Pi was about 50$, crazy times
- bogota 4mo ago[dead]
- alberth 4mo agoRaspberry 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/ https://investors.raspberrypi.com/
- echoangle 4mo agoThe next point under your quoted sales figure: 25% Enthusiasts and education 75% Industrial and embedded
- oehtXRwMkIs 4mo agooff 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
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- justin66 4mo agoThey’ve been selling much more to industrial customers than hobbyists for the better part of a decade.
- geerlingguy 4mo agoConsider 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.
- harrall 4mo ago
- dxxvi 4mo agoWhat 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/B099KSJN8P/ 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.
- LeoPanthera 4mo agoThat's more expensive than an equivalently specced MeLE fanless PC, which is an entire Intel PC.
- tamimio 4mo agoThe 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!
- fareesh 4mo agowas famous for being the $35 computer and it is now $350
- synergy20 4mo agoFor embedded products, 1GB can go a long way thanks for linux customization and such.
- bmurphy1976 4mo agoHey, 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.
- b89kim 4mo agoThe 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.
- phyzix5761 4mo agoIts the same picture for all of them. Why load different half a megabyte images for each pi?
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo agoThere'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?
- bschmidt500 4mo ago[dead]
- somebudyelse 4mo agoEarliest 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.adafruit.com/product/6125?src=raspberrypi https://web.archive.org/web/20250529094904/https://www.adafr...
- ivolimmen 4mo agoI have a Chromebook lying around that is cheaper than this... memory prices are crazy!
- Copenjin 4mo agoHorrible board, even at the old price. The Pi stopped making sense after the original one, if you exclude the Zero/Pico.
- Haven880 4mo agoA 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.
- fithisux 4mo agoAt that price? Sorry, no! I need the 16GB RAM, but I do not have these money anymore. Medical bills.....
- taffydavid 4mo agoPi'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
- LtWorf 4mo agoBut no ethernet port, no GPIO, no fanless. It's comparing two completely different usecases.
- crest 4mo agoI 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.
- LtWorf 4mo agoBut the result is huge, you cannot 3d print a custom case for that and put it somewhere at home…
- fragmede 4mo agoCould you 3d print a case for the usb dongle and the breadboard, and then Velcro that to the laptop?
- LtWorf 4mo agoI mean… yes… but you still have a laptop sitting there :D
- taffydavid 4mo agoYou 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
- hcfman 4mo agoPI'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 https://www.youtube.com/@hcftube1 and here https://www.youtube.com/@WildlifeSecurityInnovations https://www.youtube.com/@WildlifeSecurityInnovations
- teruakohatu 4mo agoWhat thermal camera are you using with the Pi?
- hcfman 4mo agoI 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/ 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-belgium/ 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 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.
- p0w3n3d 4mo agoI 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...
- moffkalast 4mo agoAnd 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.
- a5c11 4mo agoRaspberries 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.
- galkk 4mo agoTwo 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.
- yanhangyhy 4mo agosoon we can run LLM in RP?
- sloanfardele 4mo agoWell, I'm happy to have mine with 4 GB, as it was purchased before the crisis.
- z0ltan 4mo ago[dead]
- theoutfield 4mo agoI’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.
- finnjohnsen2 4mo agoRemember the good old days of impulse buying the latest Raspberry Pi?
- st3fan 4mo agoFor 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.
- mattlondon 4mo ago> What happened. Ram prices.
- annagio_ 4mo agoI 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.
- archerx 4mo agoYea $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.
- otterpro 4mo ago[dead]
- qubex 4mo agoI have one of these linked to a LimeSDR running GNUradio and it’s absolutely up to the task.
- niutech 4mo agoYou 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 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007473801146.html