It's crazy how Raspberry Pi & Apple prices have moved in converging direction.
Pi 5 8GB is $200
MacBook Neo 8GB is $600 (probably some edu discount available)
Sure 3x the price, but it comes with - 256GB SSD, battery, display, keyboard, trackpad..
So the Pi has slowly become too expensive for weird one-off projects and also price competitive with a cheap Mac by the time you add all the stuff you need to use it as a cheap computer.
If Apple ever got around to a headless "Mac Micro", below the Mini, which had the same specs as the Neo in desktop form it would be even more stark. They could easily ship that for $400 (mini is $300 cheaper than cheapest M-series MacBook with same ram/ssd). They might never do this as it's enough computer for most people they'd lose revenue from those otherwise spending far more at the Apple Store.
Having had a subscription to Hack-a-Day for a long time, I firmly believe that the vast majority of "weird one-off" Raspberry Pi projects don't actually need anything as capable as a Raspberry Pi SBC. It's just a matter of brand recognition and familiarity. If it gets too expensive, I suspect that more users will migrate to microcontrollers than to gutted notebooks.
You don't even need to learn anything new, I'm sure you can ask Claude to vibe code something on RP2350 nowadays and there's an 80% chance it will work.
Another Hackaday reader here. I think that the RPi shines in projects where GPIO are needed, yet the developer needs a full Linux OS (usually to run Python).
I agree that vibe coding microcontrollers will increase the use of embedded systems instead of RPi devices. Seems like a good move for them to have built the RPi Pico.
I dunno, it's not unexpected. Smartphone hardware has been cheaper, more proliferate and faster than Raspberry Pis for a while. The Pi Foundation finds a market by supporting Linux, documenting GPIO and Arduino/hat ecosystems, and advocating for a hackier, server-like approach with the cheap hardware. Game consoles, smartphones and consumer laptops are often powerful, but priced taking the customer's service revenue into account.
My Raspberry Pi is definitely outclassed by a few of my old phones and laptops. But it's also super pleasant to host services on, so it's my go-to SBC.
Every time I see entitled people crying because of the prices of a Rasperry Py I remember my first computer that had hundred of megahertz's speed and megabytes of RAM.
I could do very useful things with that machine. So it is not the end of the world if we have to go back to a world when you merely have thousands of times more memory for 4 times less money.
It could even be positive if it forces people to be more efficient writing code and wasting less resources.
I really struggle to see where this fits in to most use cases. The appeal of the Pi back in the first iterations was being a relatively cheap linux computer with GPIO.
I have decided that the Pi4 1GB is the ideal for hobbyists. Faster than Pi3, takes normal USB-C charging, and can do most single server or electronics jobs. Which is why it is currently sold out.
I really wish they made a new Zero that doesn't use ddr2 ram to ensure that it can still be made far into the future. As far as I'm aware, nobody is making ddr2 anymore
The original vision IIRC was to provide a cheap computer for students in low-income families. You could plug into your TV at home and start learning.
Then the hobby community got wind of it and proceeded to buy out all the stock on every release (myself included, I still have one of every first 3 versions sitting in my cabinet)
At this stage I think the way to realize this "cheap computer" vision is in unlocking smartphones. Either with an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone, or with an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS.
"an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone": https://postmarketos.org/
"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.
The 80s kid in me still thinks dropping someone into a linux shell with a bunch of tools and no internet access is the best learning environment. Kids these days with their fancy tiktoks and such need to summon the old ways.
The 80s kid me lived in a small town with no access to technical manuals or people who could help. The developer manuals for $80 each or a compuserve account to get access to the source code examples of the manufacturer were completely out of reach. What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
> What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
Probably nothing. That free info also comes with YouTube and TikTok and every TV show and movie and game on demand. You have to be very disciplined to focus on difficult topics in a sea of easier and more gratifying entertainment.
RPis get sold more to the businesses and startups that started with them in 2010s, rather than hobbyists now.
If you cannot negotiate a good deal with the big industrial silicon manufacturers but you want good up-to-date kernels, RPis are a perfect option.
There are SoMs or SBCs with other CPUs like NXP or MediaTek that has more or less mainline support. However, they ask more money. The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel issues that the CPU and the board manufacturer missed.
There are also lots of cheaper SoMs if you're not allergic to Chinese chipsets, and the cheaper ones tend to have PoP on-package DDR so you can spin your own 4-layer PCB without having to pull your hair out impedance matching DDR3+ traces. That, of course, if you can fit into ~64MB RAM.
> The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel
NXP/i.MX are way better at mainline kernel than Broadcom that RPi is based on, come on.. and they have cheaper options like i.MX 9 series. Other vendors, yes, mainline support could be pretty spotty.
It's useful if you need GPIO but not $350 useful. Nowadays you can get used office mini PCs with a 10th gen Intel and 16GB RAM for like $200 and they'll come with an SSD. No idea why anyone would buy an expensive Pi.
What are you wanting to use it for? There is using Pi as desktop, which was only option for a while, but now mini PCs are much better. There is using it as server, where mini PCs are better for homelabs and multiple services but Pi is good for lightweight single service. Then there is hobbyist use, where Pi is cheap when get lightweight one and has ecosystem of hardware and software.
And GPIO support for your used office equipment is often just a cheap USB adapter away too, GPIO support is not some Pi exclusive thing, even if its 40 pin layout is widely used now etc.
Sure, but none of the hardware peripherals routed out to those pins are exclusive to that pin header.
If you need a few i2c or SPI or uart buses or even just general purpose IO then AliExpress has a gazillion little USB based modules that will get you exactly that.
If you're still very new to electronics and not at all comfortable going outside of well-established curriculum that explicitly says use this raspberry pi with this sensor attached on these pins with this library configured in this way... Yes. But that can't be most of the people paying this price?
So strange. I can probably sell my 4GB Pi 5 for about 40% more than I bought it for... 3 years ago. This isn't how computers are supposed to work, let alone Pis.
I get what's happening, but it's strange to see it happening.
Actually, could I sell it for ~10% less than someone would buy it new? Is there a market for used Pis? Maybe 30%, I don't know. That I can sell it for what I got it for at all is wild.
This isn't exactly news, that model has been at $350 for a while.
It's not like RPi suddenly introduced a 16GB model at a ridiculous price due to having forgotten about low cost stuff. The 16GB model was originally $85 iirc. Then the memory shortage hit. They could either withdraw the 16GB model (maybe screwing over some people who absolutely had to have it) or raise the price for those with urgent enough requirements. They did the latter.
Me, I'd like to see some large MCU's (let's say a little above RP2350 / ESP32 level) with a few MB of memory, but with memory protection, like old fashioned Vaxes with that much memory. That would allow running multiprocessing OS's where the processes couldn't easily clobber each other like on the current stuff. Many programs don't require GB's of ram.
This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
I first checked for Mac Minis and interestingly they are much closer to $650 for similar specs.
And obviously if Intel is fine for your use case, either the N100 type of mini PC or, my preference, an off-lease HP, Dell, or Lenovo USFF PC, would be like half that for a very capable machine.
> This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
That "laptop" will also absolutely smoke the Pi on performance, too:
My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops that I got from BYU Surplus and added some RAM (before RAM price went totally bananas) and SSDs to.
I spent less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.
I later added a large machine that I used to use as a Linux desktop, with a GPU and 64GB RAM, which I use for generating OpenStreetMap tiles.
> 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.
> 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.
The Raspberry Pi 5 uses LPDDR4X. Finding 16GB (128Gb with a small b) chips in this size is not common. That memory chip is at least $200, probably more, even at the scale that they’re buying them.
I’m glad they’re making it available for the rare cases where it’s needed, but for PR purposes it would have been better if they just discontinued the 16GB model until RAM prices came down. I’m getting tired of hearing “Raspberry Pi 5 costs $300” now from people who have no reason to buy the 16GB version.
The 1GB version works well for simple Linux shell work and embedded projects. It’s $50.
The 4GB version works well for GUI work. Let’s be real: It’s a slow device and not a desktop/laptop alternative in 2026, so 4GB goes a long way for the use cases where you want to do basic GUI work. $110 for the 4GB model (if you shop not at Adafruit)
EDIT: Adafruit prices are higher for some reason. 16GB Pi 5 is $305 on other sites.
1) Apple had long term contracts for memory which will run out. Afterwards it will be very interesting to see what they do.
2) RPi uses older memory that is much much more expensive to buy in the market as manufacturers have dedicated capacity to newer formats used by AI boxes for KV caches
These perform way better and have similar efficiency, too. Case, power supply, cooling, and storage are all included too. If you don't need GPIO then you don't need a Raspberry Pi. If you do then consider using a microcontroller (Pi Pico, ESP32, etc.) first.
I really don't know who this is targeted at. As a development board these are extremely expensive and as a mini computer you're far better off with something N100 based or similar.
Unfortunately Radxa and Milk-V are almost completely out of stock and not much cheaper. If you need more than a microcontroller there's no circumventing the memory shortage at this point.
Kicking myself for not buying the Q6A at the beginning of the year (I wanted three and arace would only sell one per customer, but one would've been better than none).
Similar situation, one thing I like the with the Pis design is you can throw PoE hats on them and build a whole home infrastructure system where the only thing that needs battery backup for power cuts is the main ethernet switch - all of the essential services, switches and wifi APs are powered downstream by their ethernet ports over PoE.
Makes making your key network services (VPN, firewall, DNS, NTP, home assistant etc) on battery backup very easy, as just one plug to the primary switch to keep powered, and my wifi/internet stays on when the power cuts.
I could use other devices, but 5 pis with PoE hats rack mount very cleanly in a single 1U row and passively cooled with no fan noise etc.
Imagine having a business relying on the Pi boards!
It’s worth adding Pi4@1GB still costs $35 but any other memory configurations (and Pi5) go for much more now.
I wonder so much what their initial capacity was (which ought to go up marginally, and what their expected capacity curves look like.
I would not expect them to dump cheap ram. That is a false hope. The world needs volume, massively more volume, and it feels like everyone else is going to take a sizable fraction of a decade to even start responding. Maybe perhaps possibly CXMT can scale fast, but they have many multiples to grow before they are more than a drop in the bucket.
It's also unclear when if they too will want to start stacking 12 then 16 then 24 rams atop each other, to sell chips that cost what multiples of what GPUs used to.
They won't, no one will. Too much investment for too much of a risk of the bubble popping and yet another run of the boom-bust cycle that left the world with not even a handful of RAM makers in the first place.
They’re not equivalent devices in almost any dimension. I got a pizza at the grocery store for $6. It has no bearing on raspberry pi being a joke or not.
I don't think I have any beef with what you're pointing out - I was only saying that I don't think the Radxa products' pricing are demonstrating anything too shocking about the Rpi products' pricing.
I personally would probably choose one of those over a Rpi (but would probably still rather buy more off-lease Elitedesk G6 Minis, which is what I use for 'lil computer' projects)
> I was only saying that I don't think the Radxa products' pricing are demonstrating anything too shocking about the Rpi products' pricing.
I agree it's not too shocking, I think prices have increased everywhere including competitors.
> off-lease Elitedesk G6 Minis
Those are great if you can surface them!
I've also been enjoying the N100 mini-ITX boards from ASROCK[1] and ASUS. Great choice if you already have a power supply and some RAM stockpiled. The ASUS one uses SODIMM. They use very little power.
Dram prices and Flash prices are inflated right now, but the pi were never focused on Desktop users. As a platform it no longer makes sense for many use cases. =3
I’m surprised to see those legacy USB ports on a board where space savings is important. Do they do it for backwards compatibility with older cases and housings?
And am I correct to see that the USB-C only does power? How do you connect your pheripherals to this board?
I think legacy USB peripherals are very common. Almost all of my peripherals are legacy USB; I think I only own a single USB-C peripheral. Old stuff still works, so I don't need to buy new ones.
Interesting. I don’t own any legacy USB equipment anymore, everything is USB-C now. I started phasing out my old equipment ten years ago and everything from the past five years has had USB-C as standard. Even my shaver chargers over USB-C.
I guess that the people who use $350 boards also mainly use USB-C. Unless you want to connect old hardware to it but I don’t see that use-case.
Not being able to connect my devices to this board is a blocker for me.
Understandable but I would have preferred a couple of fully functional USB-C ports and then have people use dongles for using old hardware on this board. Similar to using a serial adapter.
This is really sad. Me and my girlfriend at the time watched all of our movies off of a Pi 1 and a USB hard drive when it came out. Those days are long gone.
Before the personal LLM craze you could easily get $400 Mac Minis from Apple's certified refurbished store. I bought two M2 Pros for that price and turned them into Asahi Linux CI machines.
Cheapest mac mini I could spec out on the apple store right now is about $750, which if you consider how much more capable its M4 processor is than the pi, is a pretty good deal tbh.
because Apple goes in and buys out entire production cycles based on anticipated demand. Most infamously they got a year worth of TSMCs last new node - no one else could have it.
Usually, that gamble pays off, sometimes it does not (cough Apple Vision), and in some cases they get so many QC rejects that they can make an entire new product line on (financially) worthless scrap, that's how the MacBook Neo came to be - a bunch of iPhone SoC's that failed binning, I think in GPU cores.
I think people commentating here are missing the point. The cost of that pi is for the 16 GB of RAM. Which in fairness, is a lot of RAM for a device of that type.
You can still buy a Raspberry Pi on a budget if you don’t need that much memory. For example, the 2 GB model is $75.
Pi even before these ram prices was getting expensive and kind of missing the point from my perspective. Definitely good to have them releasing new models.
What bothers me is that now you need cooling for some models, and obviously price is getting too high.
On the other hand... $50 for 1Gb version is excellent still. And you should be able to use it just fine.
Some folks might have missed that memory prices on the whole are up [1] 90% since Q4.
The memory used by the Pi 5 is up 700% [2]!
Raspberry Pi are working the issue by releasing new memory variants that are cheaper[2].
Edit: You can still walk into a Microcenter and get Pi 5 16GB for US $289!
1. https://au.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
2. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/a-new-3gb-raspberry-pi-4-fo...
It's crazy how Raspberry Pi & Apple prices have moved in converging direction.
Pi 5 8GB is $200
MacBook Neo 8GB is $600 (probably some edu discount available) Sure 3x the price, but it comes with - 256GB SSD, battery, display, keyboard, trackpad..
So the Pi has slowly become too expensive for weird one-off projects and also price competitive with a cheap Mac by the time you add all the stuff you need to use it as a cheap computer.
If Apple ever got around to a headless "Mac Micro", below the Mini, which had the same specs as the Neo in desktop form it would be even more stark. They could easily ship that for $400 (mini is $300 cheaper than cheapest M-series MacBook with same ram/ssd). They might never do this as it's enough computer for most people they'd lose revenue from those otherwise spending far more at the Apple Store.
Having had a subscription to Hack-a-Day for a long time, I firmly believe that the vast majority of "weird one-off" Raspberry Pi projects don't actually need anything as capable as a Raspberry Pi SBC. It's just a matter of brand recognition and familiarity. If it gets too expensive, I suspect that more users will migrate to microcontrollers than to gutted notebooks.
You don't even need to learn anything new, I'm sure you can ask Claude to vibe code something on RP2350 nowadays and there's an 80% chance it will work.
Another Hackaday reader here. I think that the RPi shines in projects where GPIO are needed, yet the developer needs a full Linux OS (usually to run Python).
I agree that vibe coding microcontrollers will increase the use of embedded systems instead of RPi devices. Seems like a good move for them to have built the RPi Pico.
8GB of LPDDR memory is around $100 in volume.
That leaves $100 for everything else on the Pi, including the hardware, building it, transporting it, and retailer margin.
That leaves $500 for everything else on the MacBook Neo.
That's why you can get so much more from the MacBook Neo. There's 5X as much budget for everything other than RAM.
I 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.
Every time I see entitled people crying because of the prices of a Rasperry Py I remember my first computer that had hundred of megahertz's speed and megabytes of RAM.
I could do very useful things with that machine. So it is not the end of the world if we have to go back to a world when you merely have thousands of times more memory for 4 times less money.
It could even be positive if it forces people to be more efficient writing code and wasting less resources.
I really struggle to see where this fits in to most use cases. The appeal of the Pi back in the first iterations was being a relatively cheap linux computer with GPIO.
This (the 16GB version) should not fit into most use cases. You’re buying an expensive RAM chip with a Pi attached.
The cheaper 4GB or even 1GB versions ($50 for the latter) are what most people should be looking at for their projects.
I have decided that the Pi4 1GB is the ideal for hobbyists. Faster than Pi3, takes normal USB-C charging, and can do most single server or electronics jobs. Which is why it is currently sold out.
My personal fave RPi, the Zero W, is still $15 from Adafruit.
I really wish they made a new Zero that doesn't use ddr2 ram to ensure that it can still be made far into the future. As far as I'm aware, nobody is making ddr2 anymore
Is anyone making DDR5?
For AI, sure
The original vision IIRC was to provide a cheap computer for students in low-income families. You could plug into your TV at home and start learning.
Then the hobby community got wind of it and proceeded to buy out all the stock on every release (myself included, I still have one of every first 3 versions sitting in my cabinet)
At this stage I think the way to realize this "cheap computer" vision is in unlocking smartphones. Either with an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone, or with an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS.
"an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone": https://postmarketos.org/
"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.
I have been trying out the FX1s. It is a good replacement with some rough edges still. Better battery life than previous Pixel 6a and Fairphone 4.
Dock can not handle an Ultrawide 1440x3440 display.
Right now it is a backup phone and my music player.
https://furilabs.com/
The 80s kid in me still thinks dropping someone into a linux shell with a bunch of tools and no internet access is the best learning environment. Kids these days with their fancy tiktoks and such need to summon the old ways.
The 80s kid me lived in a small town with no access to technical manuals or people who could help. The developer manuals for $80 each or a compuserve account to get access to the source code examples of the manufacturer were completely out of reach. What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
> What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
Probably nothing. That free info also comes with YouTube and TikTok and every TV show and movie and game on demand. You have to be very disciplined to focus on difficult topics in a sea of easier and more gratifying entertainment.
People have been saying this for years, yet Raspberry Pis just keep on selling with no trouble.
RPis get sold more to the businesses and startups that started with them in 2010s, rather than hobbyists now.
If you cannot negotiate a good deal with the big industrial silicon manufacturers but you want good up-to-date kernels, RPis are a perfect option.
There are SoMs or SBCs with other CPUs like NXP or MediaTek that has more or less mainline support. However, they ask more money. The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel issues that the CPU and the board manufacturer missed.
There are also lots of cheaper SoMs if you're not allergic to Chinese chipsets, and the cheaper ones tend to have PoP on-package DDR so you can spin your own 4-layer PCB without having to pull your hair out impedance matching DDR3+ traces. That, of course, if you can fit into ~64MB RAM.
> The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel
NXP/i.MX are way better at mainline kernel than Broadcom that RPi is based on, come on.. and they have cheaper options like i.MX 9 series. Other vendors, yes, mainline support could be pretty spotty.
Raspberry Pi’s keep selling because the software ecosystem is solid.
Yeah they do keep selling, I wonder though if hobbyist sales have dropped.
They're relatively common in industrial applications now because they have really good software support and great long-term availability.
It's useful if you need GPIO but not $350 useful. Nowadays you can get used office mini PCs with a 10th gen Intel and 16GB RAM for like $200 and they'll come with an SSD. No idea why anyone would buy an expensive Pi.
What are you wanting to use it for? There is using Pi as desktop, which was only option for a while, but now mini PCs are much better. There is using it as server, where mini PCs are better for homelabs and multiple services but Pi is good for lightweight single service. Then there is hobbyist use, where Pi is cheap when get lightweight one and has ecosystem of hardware and software.
And GPIO support for your used office equipment is often just a cheap USB adapter away too, GPIO support is not some Pi exclusive thing, even if its 40 pin layout is widely used now etc.
It's not the GPIO, it's the software ecosystem for anything you would want to connect to the GPIO.
Sure, but none of the hardware peripherals routed out to those pins are exclusive to that pin header.
If you need a few i2c or SPI or uart buses or even just general purpose IO then AliExpress has a gazillion little USB based modules that will get you exactly that.
If you're still very new to electronics and not at all comfortable going outside of well-established curriculum that explicitly says use this raspberry pi with this sensor attached on these pins with this library configured in this way... Yes. But that can't be most of the people paying this price?
So strange. I can probably sell my 4GB Pi 5 for about 40% more than I bought it for... 3 years ago. This isn't how computers are supposed to work, let alone Pis.
I get what's happening, but it's strange to see it happening.
Actually, could I sell it for ~10% less than someone would buy it new? Is there a market for used Pis? Maybe 30%, I don't know. That I can sell it for what I got it for at all is wild.
I'm still surprised that cryptocurrency fucking the GPU market was just a warm-up for the real supply chain shortages.
Huh and I am running home assistant on my Pi 5 I guess it is time to sell.
A lot of computer parts can be sold at a high profit nowadays.
This isn't exactly news, that model has been at $350 for a while.
It's not like RPi suddenly introduced a 16GB model at a ridiculous price due to having forgotten about low cost stuff. The 16GB model was originally $85 iirc. Then the memory shortage hit. They could either withdraw the 16GB model (maybe screwing over some people who absolutely had to have it) or raise the price for those with urgent enough requirements. They did the latter.
Me, I'd like to see some large MCU's (let's say a little above RP2350 / ESP32 level) with a few MB of memory, but with memory protection, like old fashioned Vaxes with that much memory. That would allow running multiprocessing OS's where the processes couldn't easily clobber each other like on the current stuff. Many programs don't require GB's of ram.
This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
I first checked for Mac Minis and interestingly they are much closer to $650 for similar specs.
And obviously if Intel is fine for your use case, either the N100 type of mini PC or, my preference, an off-lease HP, Dell, or Lenovo USFF PC, would be like half that for a very capable machine.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=m1%20macbook%20air%2016...
> This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
That "laptop" will also absolutely smoke the Pi on performance, too:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/24356484?baseli...
For what it is worth, an M4 mac mini is also like 30-50x faster. Like, legitimately.
My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops that I got from BYU Surplus and added some RAM (before RAM price went totally bananas) and SSDs to. I spent less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.
I later added a large machine that I used to use as a Linux desktop, with a GPU and 64GB RAM, which I use for generating OpenStreetMap tiles.
> 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.
> 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.
How much power does that cluster consume?
The Raspberry Pi 5 uses LPDDR4X. Finding 16GB (128Gb with a small b) chips in this size is not common. That memory chip is at least $200, probably more, even at the scale that they’re buying them.
I’m glad they’re making it available for the rare cases where it’s needed, but for PR purposes it would have been better if they just discontinued the 16GB model until RAM prices came down. I’m getting tired of hearing “Raspberry Pi 5 costs $300” now from people who have no reason to buy the 16GB version.
The 1GB version works well for simple Linux shell work and embedded projects. It’s $50.
The 4GB version works well for GUI work. Let’s be real: It’s a slow device and not a desktop/laptop alternative in 2026, so 4GB goes a long way for the use cases where you want to do basic GUI work. $110 for the 4GB model (if you shop not at Adafruit)
EDIT: Adafruit prices are higher for some reason. 16GB Pi 5 is $305 on other sites.
Microcenter (another official US reseller) sells the Pi5 16GB at a much lower price[1].
1. https://www.microcenter.com/product/702590/raspberry-pi-5
$289, for everybody who doesn't want to click.
we've lost the plot. this is no longer a hobbyist computer.
Pi hasn't been a hobbyist computer since they were prioritised for large-volume business purchasers during COVID.
As for the education market, that's a long forgotten pipedream.
Two months ago I bought a M4 Mini w/16GB and 512GB HDD for $599. Granted they're up to $799 right now, but a Rpi is now $350 when they used to be $35?
You're correct; they've jumped the shark.
Two things to note:
1) Apple had long term contracts for memory which will run out. Afterwards it will be very interesting to see what they do.
2) RPi uses older memory that is much much more expensive to buy in the market as manufacturers have dedicated capacity to newer formats used by AI boxes for KV caches
The linked model has 16x the amount of RAM that $35 model had. You can still get a 1GB model for less than $50.
You can get an Intel N100 NUC with 16GB ram, 500GB ssd on Amazon for less though.
This is just very expensive for what it is.
These perform way better and have similar efficiency, too. Case, power supply, cooling, and storage are all included too. If you don't need GPIO then you don't need a Raspberry Pi. If you do then consider using a microcontroller (Pi Pico, ESP32, etc.) first.
If you just want a tiny desktop computer, sure. The reason to buy a Pi is for the GPIO and the well-established ecosystem.
I really don't know who this is targeted at. As a development board these are extremely expensive and as a mini computer you're far better off with something N100 based or similar.
What market is this trying to compete in?
To me it seems like they are just cannibalizing their customer base that bought into their ecosystem early.
Feels like they’re just surfing the name recognition wave at this point.
This is because on a COGs basis it is memory with a side of compute.
I think you're overlooking the 16GB part, it's a niche of a niche device... 1GB is still $50
Search Aliexpress for ESP32-C3 Development Board for Arduino
Search arace.tech for Radxa or Milk-V boards.
Unfortunately Radxa and Milk-V are almost completely out of stock and not much cheaper. If you need more than a microcontroller there's no circumventing the memory shortage at this point.
Kicking myself for not buying the Q6A at the beginning of the year (I wanted three and arace would only sell one per customer, but one would've been better than none).
At least get a -C6 if you're trying to replace a Pi with a microcontroller.
Who would've thought the $50 pi 5 I bought on a whim would be my best performing asset in the last few years
$50 would have bought the 2GB model at launch.
The 2GB model is now $65, so don’t get too excited.
I checked my email and I paid $60 for the 4GB model in 2023. >2x returns in 3 years isn't so bad.
That price I'd just buy an Optiplex or something
I have 4 RPi servers in my house on 24/7 but yeah
Funny different purpose but I bought a 2017 Pixelbook put Ubuntu on it, great machine it was $80
Similar situation, one thing I like the with the Pis design is you can throw PoE hats on them and build a whole home infrastructure system where the only thing that needs battery backup for power cuts is the main ethernet switch - all of the essential services, switches and wifi APs are powered downstream by their ethernet ports over PoE.
Makes making your key network services (VPN, firewall, DNS, NTP, home assistant etc) on battery backup very easy, as just one plug to the primary switch to keep powered, and my wifi/internet stays on when the power cuts.
I could use other devices, but 5 pis with PoE hats rack mount very cleanly in a single 1U row and passively cooled with no fan noise etc.
It's worth mentioning you're paying a $45 Adafruit tax here. Adafruit charges more for Pis.
The US has a plethora of alternative authorised resellers who are lower priced:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/#:~:text...
The $35 computer, for only $350!
Imagine having a business relying on the Pi boards! It’s worth adding Pi4@1GB still costs $35 but any other memory configurations (and Pi5) go for much more now.
Are Raspberry Pis (UK country of origin) exempt from the 10% baseline import tariff?
Are they actually made in the UK?
I'd presume they're shipped from China like most tech goods.
They actually have a factory in the UK, one that previously made Sony TVs IIRC.
Some are made in China and Japan, most are made in Wales.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-raspberry-pis-are...
Even worse, continued RAM shortages and inflation might actually mean that will have been a good price in a year's time.
The memory price rises are flattening. Prices are still increasing but not at the rate they previously were last year.
Every day I go to bed praying CXMT hurries the *$!@ up and dumps an ungodly amount of cheap RAM upon global markets
if anything, pricing will be around the same. Difference will be in availability.
I wonder so much what their initial capacity was (which ought to go up marginally, and what their expected capacity curves look like.
I would not expect them to dump cheap ram. That is a false hope. The world needs volume, massively more volume, and it feels like everyone else is going to take a sizable fraction of a decade to even start responding. Maybe perhaps possibly CXMT can scale fast, but they have many multiples to grow before they are more than a drop in the bucket.
It's also unclear when if they too will want to start stacking 12 then 16 then 24 rams atop each other, to sell chips that cost what multiples of what GPUs used to.
They won't, no one will. Too much investment for too much of a risk of the bubble popping and yet another run of the boom-bust cycle that left the world with not even a handful of RAM makers in the first place.
I got an i5 Thinkpad T480 for 100usd.. Rpi is a joke
They’re not equivalent devices in almost any dimension. I got a pizza at the grocery store for $6. It has no bearing on raspberry pi being a joke or not.
Come on, a one gigabyte Pi is under $50. There's no plot lost, it's just expensive RAM. 2gb is $75. That's where Pi plays well.
Yet the Radxa Rock 4d[1] has 4Gb and is selling for 69 dollars.
[1]: https://arace.tech/products/radxa-rock-4d
Four of those would be $280 though, so this doesn't seem hilariously out of scale with that.
But ram prices don't scale linearly. The 4Gb variant of RPi5 is $130.
Radxa does have a 16Gb board[1] on pre-order, coming in at $329. Though the Dragon Q8B appears to be quite a bit more capable.
[1]: https://arace.tech/products/radxa-dragon-q8b
I don't think I have any beef with what you're pointing out - I was only saying that I don't think the Radxa products' pricing are demonstrating anything too shocking about the Rpi products' pricing.
I personally would probably choose one of those over a Rpi (but would probably still rather buy more off-lease Elitedesk G6 Minis, which is what I use for 'lil computer' projects)
> I was only saying that I don't think the Radxa products' pricing are demonstrating anything too shocking about the Rpi products' pricing.
I agree it's not too shocking, I think prices have increased everywhere including competitors.
> off-lease Elitedesk G6 Minis
Those are great if you can surface them!
I've also been enjoying the N100 mini-ITX boards from ASROCK[1] and ASUS. Great choice if you already have a power supply and some RAM stockpiled. The ASUS one uses SODIMM. They use very little power.
[1]: https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/index.asp
2 years ago I bought a Dell R630 for about this much with 128GB of RAM and 2 beefy xeons (for their gen, anyhow). Oh, how the times have changed.
Holy cow. I know I'm not supposed to be surprised given the memory shortage, but that is insane level.
Up ~50% about 2 months ago (4/2026)
Or one can also get a better specification i5 or Ryzen 4650U laptop for <$260 with SSD and LCD, then hot glue a 32bit Arduino to the lid.
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100017489%204016%20601497625%2...
Dram prices and Flash prices are inflated right now, but the pi were never focused on Desktop users. As a platform it no longer makes sense for many use cases. =3
Damn I think I have one in a drawer.
I’m surprised to see those legacy USB ports on a board where space savings is important. Do they do it for backwards compatibility with older cases and housings?
And am I correct to see that the USB-C only does power? How do you connect your pheripherals to this board?
I think legacy USB peripherals are very common. Almost all of my peripherals are legacy USB; I think I only own a single USB-C peripheral. Old stuff still works, so I don't need to buy new ones.
Interesting. I don’t own any legacy USB equipment anymore, everything is USB-C now. I started phasing out my old equipment ten years ago and everything from the past five years has had USB-C as standard. Even my shaver chargers over USB-C.
I guess that the people who use $350 boards also mainly use USB-C. Unless you want to connect old hardware to it but I don’t see that use-case.
Not being able to connect my devices to this board is a blocker for me.
Looks like all the USB-A devices purchased over the past 30 years have not been trashed and some people still use them.
Understandable but I would have preferred a couple of fully functional USB-C ports and then have people use dongles for using old hardware on this board. Similar to using a serial adapter.
There are still new USB-A devices being sold, it's not like it's deprecated or something
This is really sad. Me and my girlfriend at the time watched all of our movies off of a Pi 1 and a USB hard drive when it came out. Those days are long gone.
You 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
You don't need the 16GB model to watch movies, you can do that on the cheapest ones.
I hate this timeline: How is a Pi marginally cheaper than a Mac Mini?
Where do you buy your Mac Minis?
Before the personal LLM craze you could easily get $400 Mac Minis from Apple's certified refurbished store. I bought two M2 Pros for that price and turned them into Asahi Linux CI machines.
In Europe, but I didn't realize the 499 one is also history. Even worse :/
At a store, some stores do have stock. Otherwise apple.com
Cheapest mac mini I could spec out on the apple store right now is about $750, which if you consider how much more capable its M4 processor is than the pi, is a pretty good deal tbh.
because Apple goes in and buys out entire production cycles based on anticipated demand. Most infamously they got a year worth of TSMCs last new node - no one else could have it.
Usually, that gamble pays off, sometimes it does not (cough Apple Vision), and in some cases they get so many QC rejects that they can make an entire new product line on (financially) worthless scrap, that's how the MacBook Neo came to be - a bunch of iPhone SoC's that failed binning, I think in GPU cores.
I think people commentating here are missing the point. The cost of that pi is for the 16 GB of RAM. Which in fairness, is a lot of RAM for a device of that type.
You can still buy a Raspberry Pi on a budget if you don’t need that much memory. For example, the 2 GB model is $75.
"Don't you know there's a war on?"
Pi even before these ram prices was getting expensive and kind of missing the point from my perspective. Definitely good to have them releasing new models.
What bothers me is that now you need cooling for some models, and obviously price is getting too high.
On the other hand... $50 for 1Gb version is excellent still. And you should be able to use it just fine.
LMAO what a joke. N100 mini PCs are a hundred dollars less and vastly more capable aside from GPIO.
An N100 with no RAM is $100 less, but throw in 16GB of ram and now they’re $150+ more…
Also you’re missing the point.