Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM(adafruit.com) |
Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM(adafruit.com) |
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also you’re missing the point.
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.
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.
6 months ago, I also started experimenting with Raspberry Pi, and now I am working on a Chromecast alternative for businesses called Soljacast using RPi. My device can work as digital signage, or a casting device for co-workings and event companies that use computers at events for presentations.
I am also using it to build a personal companion AI device with a screen, sort of like an Amazon Echo Show but with Microsoft's Clippy in there. So I am sure people are building even more complex stuff than me.
Here is a video of how my device is being used at a local exhibition venue: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FF3I9EOs4AA
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.
25% Enthusiasts and education 75% Industrial and embedded
And am I correct to see that the USB-C only does power? How do you connect your pheripherals to this board?
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.
If anything, it's probably like an order of magnitude more common, even for new designs
Truly tragic we are going through this again but here we are.
The Pi was supposed to be cheap. What happened.
Ram prices.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/#:~:text...
I need the 16GB RAM, but I do not have these money anymore. Medical bills.....
But, sure: It's definitely even cheaper than that to just sit back and complain about it.
Pi - 73 million sold
ESP32 - 1 billion sold
STM32 - 13 billion sold
For every 1 Pi sold, there’s almost 200 STM32s sold.
Firstly, Pis and SBCs like it tend to be fully functional OOBE on their own. This has useful properties but also means that hooking them up and testing their use is a little bit simpler even compared to a microcontroller dev board
Secondly, it's a full Linux ecosystem and all of that that it entails. This ecosystem has more in it than these ecosystems (especially in the FOSS world) and it's also useful for projects that exceed a few MB of RAM. Sure if I want to do a few things a microcontroller like this is a very very good and probably the better option (it isn't that difficult to write a lil C to control these things) but SBCs can do lot more than that while still keeping many of the advantages, which may be the difference in some cases
> From 28 December 2024, the rules apply to mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, headsets, videogame consoles, portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems and earbuds sold in the EU. From 28 April 2026, they will also apply to laptops.
Edit:
It’s this right?
https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-common-c...
That’s only for battery powered devices afaik.
The memory used by the Pi 5 is up 700% [2]!
Raspberry Pi are working the issue by releasing new memory variants that are cheaper[2].
Edit: You can still walk into a Microcenter and get Pi 5 16GB for US $289!
1. https://au.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
2. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/a-new-3gb-raspberry-pi-4-fo...
An 8 GiB DIMM for a desktop or server is using 8x 1 GiB chips or 16x 512 MiB chips (9/18 for ECC). An 8 GiB Pi uses a single 8 GiB chip. That's the same density as you would use for 128 GiB or larger sticks.
Thank you for the explanation.
I wish PIs used SODIMMs. I'm sure there's a reason they don't involving address and data lines, but I wish they used cheap, commodity RAM.
> unsurprisingly
You can't use other speed standards of RAM in a computer designed for a faster (or slower) standard.
If it needs DDR5 it can't use DDR, DDR2, DDR3, or DDR4. I don't think I've ever seen any x86 machine that could use older slower standards.
You could use EDO in some FPRAM machines, and FPDRAM in EDO machines at a 15% speed penalty. You can use slightly faster DRAM in a machine that wants slower: later in their lives, I maxed out the RAM in some PowerMac G3 machines that wanted 66MHz DRAM using cheaper, already obsolete, 100MHz DRAM, or 133MHz DRAM in ones that only wanted 100MHz. But only within that standard.
It's an idea that has some merit. I still use old Thinkpads that need DDR3 as what would have been prohibitively expensive when they were new is now cheap -- I have maxed-out 16GB X220 and T420 machines, and a near-full W520 with 24GB.
But not DDR4, and you can't max out old DDR2 machines as big DDR2 DIMMs always were expensive and still are.
Raspberry Pi are working on the issue but letting you spend the same amount of money per GB, for fewer GB.
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.
I still buy them. And a lot of them. Because with a Raspberry Pi 5 I'm able to make amazing wildlife camera sysetems that use thermal imaging and local AI to make an extremely effective solar powered wolf detector. I have a system in the field that's been running continuously since September 29 2025, over 8 months autonomously. It also records full frame thermal video in h264 24/7 and I can remotely retrieve images and video. That's a lot of functionality on a Pi 5.
I've collected over 60 videos of wolves from just one site with a Raspberry Pi 5 in this manner. In Belgium... Which is not exactly the biggest hot spot for wolves.
Videos here
https://www.youtube.com/@hcftube1
and here
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.
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.
We just aren't making enough stuff to keep up with demand.
This kind of thing has happened before.
Some computer-oriented highlights from the memory hole: An epoxy plant burned in 1993 that had supplied ~60% of that stuff for semiconductor packaging which caused widespread issues, there were aspects of RAM shortages in middle 90s (mostly because Windows adoption increased demand), we had Thailand floods that screwed up hard drive production, we had the crypto boom affecting GPUs in a big way from ~2016 to ~2022. There were covid-era chip shortages (which had been rationally predicted years before the covid scramble) while the Chia crypto bubble also ate up storage devices around that time.
It sucks for consumers (read: buyers) when this stuff happens, but it's been pretty normal for a really long time.
The current shortage is due to hugely-increased demand in the datacenter space and that's a new problem, but it's just one in a long list of problems that had been new when they surfaced. :)
---
Anyway, yeah: When prices are high, it becomes time to go through the pile of hardware and sell some stuff.
It's not like RPi suddenly introduced a 16GB model at a ridiculous price due to having forgotten about low cost stuff. The 16GB model was originally $85 iirc. Then the memory shortage hit. They could either withdraw the 16GB model (maybe screwing over some people who absolutely had to have it) or raise the price for those with urgent enough requirements. They did the latter.
Me, I'd like to see some large MCU's (let's say a little above RP2350 / ESP32 level) with a few MB of memory, but with memory protection, like old fashioned Vaxes with that much memory. That would allow running multiprocessing OS's where the processes couldn't easily clobber each other like on the current stuff. Many programs don't require GB's of ram.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
a big ask in most of the UK, though.
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.
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
On 2025-12-18 I bought a RPi 5 kit on Amazon from CanaKit that consisted of an 8 GB Pi 5 with the official RPi 5 256 GB SSD, case, fan, 45W power supply, and some cables which came fully assembled.
It was $209.99.
Today it is $339.97.
On 2025-09-02 I bought a Samsung 1 TB EVO Plus M.2 SSD along with along with a Sabrent USB-C M.2/SATA enclosure to use with my RPi 4.
It was $64.99 for the SSD and $22.75 for the enclosure.
Today the SSD is $255.00 (down a little from the $261.08 it reached last month) and the enclosure is $29.95.
BTW, if you are looking for an RPi it looks like you can't rely on the prices shown on rpilocator.com.
Right now for example it lists RPi 5 8 GB in stock in the US for $80 (Digi-Key), $175 (Pishop), and $200 (Adafruit). Similar for 4 GB ($60, $110, $130 at those three sellers, in the same order). Same pattern for RPi 4. 8 GB from the same three sellers in the same order: $75, $165, $190. 4 GB $55, $100, $120.
Clicking the links reveals all the Digi-Key entries are wrong. Their actual price is the same as Pishop (whose rpilocator.com entries seem to be correct).
I know RAM prices are crazy right now, but I just bought a 16gb Ryzen 7 motherboard to repair an IdeaPad for €70
It's comparing two completely different usecases.
They have to be cheap enough that tinkers leave them in their projects.
I first checked for Mac Minis and interestingly they are much closer to $650 for similar specs.
And obviously if Intel is fine for your use case, either the N100 type of mini PC or, my preference, an off-lease HP, Dell, or Lenovo USFF PC, would be like half that for a very capable machine.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=m1%20macbook%20air%2016...
That "laptop" will also absolutely smoke the Pi on performance, too:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/24356484?baseli...
Even if you're an Apple fan, surely you don't believe that the Neo obsoletes the Air. The $500-$1,000 price segment has been alive and kicking since well before the Neo.
You're correct; they've jumped the shark.
1) Apple had long term contracts for memory which will run out. Afterwards it will be very interesting to see what they do.
2) RPi uses older memory that is much much more expensive to buy in the market as manufacturers have dedicated capacity to newer formats used by AI boxes for KV caches
Same thing happening for servers, gaming PC's, cell phones, so on.
What market is this trying to compete in?
1. https://www.microcenter.com/product/702590/raspberry-pi-5
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
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.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-memory-upgrade-32-gb-2r...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250529094904/https://www.adafr...
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.
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.
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...
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.
I'd presume they're shipped from China like most tech goods.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-raspberry-pis-are...
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
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w/
I wish a Pi 5 (and RAM in general) was cheaper, but Raspberry Pi can't control that.
I can only assume they don't actually work with the pi because if you spend just a minute looking at any reseller's inventory or even just the official website you will see they still make and sell and support boards from a decade ago.
Except... You can't. They're sold out almost entirely and none of the distributors can tell when the new batch gets in. At least in EU.
What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site?
I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-disconnected TV.
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.
So yeah, the RPi5 has gotten prohibitively expensive, at least to the point where a chinesium mini pc is cheaper, has better performance, and about the same power consumption.
Asking as someone who is considering purchasing one (just to run HA on it, obviously).
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.
You don't even need to learn anything new, I'm sure you can ask Claude to vibe code something on RP2350 nowadays and there's an 80% chance it will work.
I agree that vibe coding microcontrollers will increase the use of embedded systems instead of RPi devices. Seems like a good move for them to have built the RPi Pico.
But for now, Intel N150 mini PCs are probably a better choice than RPi for those types of tasks.
Came down to, wide software support with x86, higher performance, UEFI, secure boot and storage standards like NVME slots. It was a fair argument but doesn't apply to everyone.
Mac Nano, just like iPods!
https://wildlifesecurityinnovations.com/
Plus the run the pi in secure boot mode with encrypted drives, precisely so we can sell them as a product without loosing all our IP that goes into this. Another nice things about the Pi 5 as a platform as it's possible to do this.
The modules originally come from the company behind guideIR. Personally I think they are the best thermal sensors available. They have amazing onboard image processing so that the living things really popout in the image, you can see this in the videos.
We have photos in the banner for the website. The modules are tiny but we 3D print rain shielding enclosures for them.
We have photos of the wolf project in here
https://wildlifesecurityinnovations.com/projects/wolves-belg...
The modules draw just 1W of power, so they are great for our wildlife camera systems. And of course, they get images day and night. And we use thermal image motion detection to trigger the local AI inference. Normal PIR triggered wildlife systems can only triggrer on largish animals quite close by (Check out the wild boar video from this morning, you could never detect this with a traditional wildlife camera that uses PIR sensors https://youtu.be/rmav8IjWxeo). We can detect animals easy in the 50-100m range and with 24/7 thermal recording we can go back in time, invaluable for behavioral research.
I'm pretty sure we have the only wildlife camera system with thermal modules in high resolutions. All thanks to the Pi 5.
(Actually, we also run this with an ultra low light visible camera, also recording 24/7. With audio in both thermal and visible stream. Running on the same platform). Videos also online with the other videos.
The 1280x1024 modules are out of this world, but very expensive. Here is a video from one of those.
https://youtu.be/-QSkPBqTZh8?si=kEc18Ji2cxOpIEsJ
Later when scalability is in place then also 256x192.
The cheaper 4GB or even 1GB versions ($50 for the latter) are what most people should be looking at for their projects.
Then the hobby community got wind of it and proceeded to buy out all the stock on every release (myself included, I still have one of every first 3 versions sitting in my cabinet)
It's a supply chain problem, n
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.
> Bluetooth 4.2, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), onboard antenna
Oof ... BLE 5 has some huge improvements over 4.2. BLE 5 stuff has been on sale for almost 10 years now ...
Hopefully this gets a refresh soon.
As for the education market, that's a long forgotten pipedream.
Boards with both slots on them have started to be released due to this current ram squeeze. e.g. ASRock's H610M COMBO board[0] has 4 DDR5 and 2 DDR4 slots
[0]: https://asrock.com/MB/Intel/H610M%20COMBO/index.vn.asp#Overv...
I got around the high RAM prices by purchasing a micro center bundle deal to upgrade from my 5600X3D to a 9850X3D.
The total price was $699 for the processor, 32GB DDR5 RAM, and motherboard.
I’m not even sure how they do it. They’re basically discounting the CPU by $200 and the board and RAM by $50 each.
One theory I have is that inventory has piled up at retailers like Micro Center as consumer sales have dropped off a cliff. Perhaps consumer demand has been hurt so much that micro center’s cost basis for the RAM is still pretty low; it’s old inventory.
RAM prices have gone up but micro centers can’t magically sell their consumer ram to data centers. They are stuck selling it to consumers. So maybe they’re only willing to discount the price below market rate if you buy more stuff from them and buy in-store only. If they sold it for the old price they’d see customers coming in just to flip the memory on eBay.
I know the consumer RAM and motherboard brands are hurting and it’s only the companies producing the underlying chips that are benefiting.
Adafruit tends to be a bit more expensive. It's never bothered me since I like the company and its service, but I think pretty much anything you buy there ought to be purchased with the thought that you're prototyping and if you want to buy many parts for a final product, you'll eventually want to source parts somewhere else. (or, I assume, call Adafruit and try to negotiate a better price)
It's understandable enough why both companies are this way. Microcenter is a retail chain and can do things Adafruit cannot. (in truth, they are partners on some things, so it's more complicated than that - the point is that Microcenter is a much larger company)
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.)
Before you just vibe code, consider if it piques your interest. You might just enjoy learning, playing, and building with something new.
When you get stuck, hand it over to AI.
Less power consumption than the Pi 5 (and no heatsink), and it was the first to offer the combination of USB booting, more than 1GB RAM, and Gigabit Ethernet. And reasonably priced in 2019.
> 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.
The Pi 1 model B+ was released in 2014. They still make and support it today and will keep doing it until at least 2030. You can just buy that instead. They are not apple.
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).
This is just very expensive for what it is.
I migrated from Homey to HA, and with 2500+ entities across some 250-300 devices the HA Green performed well. It would sit at about 55% RAM usage with 5-7% CPU load, so in no way resource strained.
My storage however was not exactly doing well. I frequently hit 80% or more storage used (of the 32GB eMMC). The HA Green uses USB2 and has no connectors for adding more storage like the M.2 slot on the HA Yellow, so there was no easy upgrade path.
Compute wise and RAM wise the device did well. I ran HA, Mosquito, ESPHome Device Builder, Matter Server, OpenThread Border Router, Piper, Speech to Phrase and a couple other add-ons, and besides the speech stuff it worked well and responded fast to almost everything.
Speech in any other language than English is slow at best. English is a little better, but don't expect to have long conversations with it in realtime. For my use case, of making one way announcements, it didn't matter much if it spent 3 or 30 seconds preparing the announcement, it would arrive when it arrived.
The HA Green lives on in my summerhouse which has around 900 entities and maybe 50 devices. It works well there, sits at 2% CPU, 39% RAM, and 45% storage, so I guess it depends on the "size" of your installation.
At home I'm monitoring "all the things", EV stats, EV Charger stats, heat pump stats, TRVs, smart electricity meter, room level presence detection (Bluetooth LE), mmWave presence detection, Smart Switches, Smart TVs, Apple TVs, Sonos Speakers, everything. I also have around 100 automations dealing with various house states, like when the heat pump and EV charger both kick in at full power, an automation will tell the EV charger to chill a bit before it blows the main fuse, and once the heat pump finishes its cycle, ramp up the EV charger again.
The summerhouse, on account of being smaller, naturally has less stuff going on. It's a place for relaxation, and most automations and sensors there are targeted at detecting stuff when we're not around like water leaks, temperature drops, heating anomalies, motion detection by the cameras, etc.
Sounds like the HA Green should be more than enough for my needs - that is testing if the grass is really greener on the other side of the fence of my Amazon-walled garden.
It was tiny, and the assumption was correct - most families had an HDMI capable TV and could afford the device and a usb keyboard.
A used PC still needs a desk and a monitor. This was far more accessible.
What country are you from ? There’s a list of countries that we can ship to (Only whole systems as that’s our product). 640 resolution requires export licenses for us to countries outside of the EU. We apply for those for our customers. You will need to supply end user statements and identify who you are.
The modules we ship have 25 fps frame rate.
The UK is in the list of countries we can ship to. It is outside of the EU so we would need to apply for an export license for you.
384x288 resolution does not require an export license for us to ship to the UK. But it does require an end user statement.
However, if the UK also requires an import license, then I have no advice for you here. Interesting to know though, as it would complicate exporting to there.
If you need a few i2c or SPI or uart buses or even just general purpose IO then AliExpress has a gazillion little USB based modules that will get you exactly that.
If you're still very new to electronics and not at all comfortable going outside of well-established curriculum that explicitly says use this raspberry pi with this sensor attached on these pins with this library configured in this way... Yes. But that can't be most of the people paying this price?
SBC Customer: Let's say I build a product using your latest SBC. Will it get updates after I bought it?
SBC Vendor: No
SBC Customer: Okay, but surely I can at least buy more in 2035?
SBC Vendor: No
SBC Customer: Why would anyone building a commercial product be interested in your particular SBC then?
SBC Vendor: We expect you to buy and then regret your purchase.
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
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.
I personally would probably choose one of those over a Rpi (but would probably still rather buy more off-lease Elitedesk G6 Minis, which is what I use for 'lil computer' projects)
I 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.
Long gone are the days when they would sell a Pi Zero for $3.14 on Pi day.
Headerless version is out-of-stock for my nearest Microcenter (Columbus, Ohio): https://www.microcenter.com/product/643085/raspberry-pi-zero...
But they say they have 25+ of the version that comes with headers: https://www.microcenter.com/product/683270/raspberry-pi-rasp...
So a 61% price hike over 5 years, of which 24% was just inflation. If the total price really went up 200% in your country, that's exceptional and probably caused by policies unique to your country.
btw you can't compare prices without shipping because there was never an option to buy 100 at $15 each and amortize shipping. Retailers treated it as a loss leader with a limit of one per purchase, often forcing you to buy some extra junk to meet the order minimum.
"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.
Dock can not handle an Ultrawide 1440x3440 display.
Right now it is a backup phone and my music player.
Probably nothing. That free info also comes with YouTube and TikTok and every TV show and movie and game on demand. You have to be very disciplined to focus on difficult topics in a sea of easier and more gratifying entertainment.
I made a project for a band to use on-stage where it would switch between videos by tapping a bluetooth foot pedal. The stompbox-style foot pedal buttons were just wired into an ESP32 acting like a bluetooth keyboard sending 1, 2, or 3. The key bindings for mpv were setup to instantly switch to specific videos for each number. It worked perfectly.
I have also used it to real-time 1080p stream my gaming PC from another room using Moonlight so that I could play in more than one location in my home. That was also running directly from the command-line.
But trying to use something like X/Wayland and proper GUI apps usually performs poorly. 512MB of RAM and the 1GHz CPU clock struggle with that.
Yes, I think so. With strong caveats.
I used a Pi 3b as the primary video player for local media in my living room for a few years, starting a decade or so ago when that was the new hotness. The Pi Zero 2W is the same thing except with less IO and a somewhat-slower clock speed (but it can be overclocked to match the 3b).
I just put an appropriate build of Kodi on an SD card, booted it up like an appliance, pointed it at my network share, and used it.
The performance was proper for the time doing this in lets-sit-down-and-watch-a-movie mode. It was generally flawless with 1080p h.264 and lesser formats. It was not so good with h.265/HEVC, but that wasn't as common back then as it is today.
I was very pleased when I picked up a Pi 4 for this role once that came 'round. It does a very fine job with all of my 1080p media on my old dumb TV, including h.265 (which it has a hardware decoder for).
> What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site?
No, not in my experience. There may be an incantation that I don't know, but I have not had very good success with these devices with browser-based streaming media. They have, for me, been resolutely disappointing in this role. I blame gaps in the video driver/X11/browser stack, but I haven't ever wanted to go very deep into this particular rabbit hole.
> I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-disconnected TV.
If you're in the States and you can tolerate the ecosystem (which is definitely not browser-based), then you might find that a $25 ONN streaming box from Wal-Mart is a better bet for this job. These run Android.
These are horrible from a privacy standpoint, and should be avoided. They are cheap for a reason.
My war is already lost. Reaping the spoils of assimilation is only natural.
I used thin client seems much better for this.
I'd pick one up when I'm in the area this weekend...but I'm not into the scalping/arbitrage game, and I've already got a few Pi Zero Ws kicking around without a purpose that are still overkill for lots of things. (I may have bought too many of those back when Microcenter was selling them for half of MSRP at $5.)
Amazon/eBay prices are indeed gospel. You can ship something like this across the country for <$5 so location doesn't matter unless you're talking tariffs
Is 10%/$1.50 enough to pay for the retailer's freight, ~3% fee to accept credit cards, inventory carrying, rent, payroll, shrinkage, support/RMA, and fraud?
https://data.fca.org.uk/artefacts/NSM/Portal/NI-000098822/NI...
If you're using the Pi as a microcontroller that you can run Python on, then just get the cheapest Pi that meets your needs.
If you're using the Pi for computationally expensive tasks then pay more money and get the fast one.
Personally I have a Pi 5 and it's perfect for me because I want small size but high performance. People say "just buy a real computer" but that would be higher energy and larger footprint.
The whole point of these things is that you use them for whatever you can imagine. Since different people have different imaginations it only makes sense that there's a range of different devices to suit everyone.
Raspberry Pi’s biggest strength is its form factor and low power draw.
They really want to assure people that they can get a near identical replacement for years to come if they want to build a product or deploy one somewhere.
So this is the embedded Linux usecase. And... the embedded Linux ecosystem seems kinda... hacked together? You a lot of the times get Yocto Linux which is its own can of worms because you tend to invariably get meta-vendor packages that patch everything from U-Boot to the kernel to random userspace utilities. There are better cases and it depends on how much the vendor works upstream. Sometimes the vendor doesn't even bother with maintaining the meta layer and it ends up getting into a "maintained mostly by one guy in Nebraska" scenario
Some other vendors seem to take U-Boot and a copy of the Ubuntu LTS sources from 10 years ago and hacked it until it was possible to get a root shell without the thing going into a kernel panic then put the resulting image on a Google Drive or FTP server somewhere but didn't go much further than that
What ends up being is that there is like a U-Boot and Linux kernel variant for either each different SBC (or sometimes vendor thereof) duck taped together. Support, even for the peripherals included, can be spotty at best, and there are many times where you have to patch the kernel or userspace to get it to work right. I've seen boards which run the weirdest stuff, ones whose kernel patches run into the megabytes with poor (if any) documentation, boards which apparently don't want to run anything but Android, etc. There are certainly vendors that work well and upstream and make everything nice and easy but they tend to be rarer and/or more expensive
Compared that with the Pis and the difference is night and day enough that the raw specs matter less. Yes RasPi has their own kernel fork, but iirc they do work a bit upstream and the versions maintained are like 6.12 and not like 5 (which I've seen). They are also relatively easy to procure where more specialized vendors tend to be... less so. Flashing them is pretty simple and if you want to create your own image you can do that as well easily without Yocto or whatever. The HAT ecosystem is a nice way to add extensibility, the headers basically allow you to do a lot of ESPy type things as well (since Linux has native specific userspace support for GPIO, I2C, SPI, PWM, LED, hwmon, etc). And so on and so forth. And it all just kinda works
This in of itself, makes it a pretty decent option for industry, especially if it's like either n <= 1000 units or a relatively small part of the BOM itself. It often is very much the economically sensible option to stick a Pi in it rather than put many man hours into fixing problems that really shouldn't require me to open up menuconfig or apply a kernel patch again.
People like Geerling tend to come at it from the hobbyist or maker side of things but it does apply to the industrial side too. Yes in many cases knowing part XYZ will still be manufactured in 30 years is more important than the dev experience or some other factor is at play (power draw being another) but in a lot of cases its not (e.g. more portable code, stuff not requiring recertification) and the Pis also do have a relatively reasonable time guarantee too. It shouldn't be a bad experience to develop on these boards! But regardless, there are a lot of times that it is, and that's why I think the RasPi continues to do as well as it does.
This is also why I think, despite the price, it continues to do well in the hobbyist community. I can hook it up using the headers to anything SPI, I2C, etc, and start making it do things with very little software trouble and regardless if I want to do it in C or if I want to do it in Python
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia...
I personally worked on a system with raspberry compute modules 3 and 4, the total system cost was in the ~million dollar range. This was definitely a commercial product with dozens of engineers doing R&D, not a hobby project.
We were looking into smaller systems with lower profit margins (~20k USD) and for those we were considering moving away from raspberry CMs because of cost.
The main advantage of the raspberry CM ecosystem is just how widely popular it is and how cheap and available "dev boards" are (just grab a non-CM raspberry and it is almost the same thing). Most of these types of systems don't really have the I/O that makes testing and developing a lot easier.
Being popular is quite important because firmware issues are notoriously expensive to troubleshoot and fix often requiring the manufacturer help. Said manufacturer does not give a damn if you are a low-volume customer. More popular systems have more information available online and are less likely to have bugs (or at least the bugs are known).
I remember one of our other systems bluetooth module had a weird edgecase bug that caused the module to shutdown after several days of it being powered on. It took multiple engineers >1month of work to basically go "yep nothing we can do about this and manufacturer is not helping"
I know they are being used in Ukranian drones and some police-car systems in some cities (although this was hearsay from a coworker and I don't remember the city). But those are just the examples I heard of.
(plus the screen. And ethernet / PoE variants are rare, and not as cheap, so if that's a hard requirement, maybe not for your specific use case)
Setting aside what they're for, Linux handheld gaming devices are kind of a perfect fit for a minor "house computer". Made cheap by commodification. Flexible. Sadly no GPIO in these I think but tack on an RP2350 and we're golden.
Strip or modify the chassis and embed them hidden or with the screen facing out. Kachinng.
Yes. Generally only requiring a $10 PoE splitter like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134500605396
Some N100 class machines draw more power, but many don't, and there are more capable PoE splitters for a few dollars extra.
Use a USB touchscreen.
Edit: Putting a device with permanently attached battery inside of a wall or even on a mount, always plugged in gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Or you look at a mini PC and you really can’t buy one at all for much less than $200 these days. Again, no screen.
But Apple will sell you a refurbished iPad mini for $379 and you’ve got nothing to setup.
I share your concern about running it with the battery all the time, but I think it’s pretty common. I probably wouldn’t put it in my wall but I know of a place of business I frequent often that has one plugged in 24/7 and nothing has happened.
Apple power manages devices that are plugged in all the time, they’ll likely just park the battery at 80%. They are also about as good as you can get as far as hardware quality: Apple sells a bazillion devices and has definitely thought of fire risk.
The other benefit of the iPad is that the accessory ecosystem is vast.