He has seemingly been doing a mostly second channel stuff lately. Those rarely make the front page as they are usually just "here is a thing I personally found interesting" projects.
Same. Also because the margins are so high due to competition on the buyer side, bottlenecked by production which will continue to increase until there can be price competition on the producer side again.
That's cope. We might get a small dip, just like we saw in stocks. Inventing machine intelligence unlocks a lot of automation and innovation. Any data centers the labs and hyperscalers manage to get online the next few years will get filled by demand.
The first real problem machine intelligence companies could solve for their own good is how to avoid the current bottleneck in compute. Until then they are as subject to usual market behavior as any other kind of business out there.
I think we'll see prices crash within 12 months, because I don't think the data center bubble will last that long.
Market bubbles bursting doesn't lead to consumer price drops. The reduced demand from data centres will lead to a reduction in manufacturing rather a lower price.
TBD whether RAM prices are like gas or electricity. Does it fall at the same rate demand drops, or is it like gas, where it falls much slower than it spikes?
Liquidation of data center equipment flooding the used market plus a sharp drop in demand for new chips with the withdrawal of the private stimulus money flowing in from private credit. I don't know that I would call it "voluntary", but I predict that's what's going to happen.
Markets can and do enter patterns of HODL'ing blathering idiocy and can stay there indefinitely.
Once consumers think something is some precious thing this is how they react. Whether its handbags with designer logos, a pair of sneakers made for $5, flimsy pieces of paper with baseball players on them, or giant numbers representing cryptographic math solutions, people will irrationally indefinitely prop stupid things up at stratospheric prices forever.
Look at Louis Vuitton or Patek Phillipe watches. They've cost like $500,000 for 200 years (inflation adjustment of course). It's just a watch...
"Computer" has now exited the commodity class and entered that bullshit hoarding class.
The hardware tulip mania could end or it could go on until well after your grandchildren are dead
If you think Samsung hynix or micron will fix it, would they rather have the profits of Gucci or The Gap... They all switched to the scarcity model simultaneously and when a new player comes in like CXMT, they're more than happy to join the cartel and play along.
If you look back at recent history, you'll see that something very similar happened to the GPU market during the Bitcoin boom---there was short term scarcity when miners were snapping up all the cards they could get their hands on, causing street prices to go through the roof, then prices dropped back to normal until the AI boom caused them to skyrocket again. The amount of hardware liquidated in the data center bust will be multiple orders of magnitude more than the bitcoin bust.
The article you've linked makes no claim that it has anything to do with greed any everything to do with protecting the supply chain since there is currently a large monetary incentive for people to fuck with it.
They have been struggling for years to match supply with demand, and RAM arbitrage would undermine those efforts... and the market would be flooded with flaky boards remanufactured in the cheapest possible way.
It says so right in the article. People were flooding the market with cheap/counterfeit/misconfigured Raspberry Pis and the organization was on the hook for support and dealing with angry customers.
I have not seen any evidence of "flooding". Just a couple posts about it. And one of those posts was saying theirs did work with the old firmware, so for that instance the Pi folks deserve the full blame for adding a check that disabled booting.
I also don't see any mention of it in this article?
They have to plan their production in advance, with budgeting, contracts, and prices decided before the products are even manufactured. This is hard to do even when you're just trying to plan for the demands of legitimate buyers.
But every single day in the meantime, RAM prices will continue fluctuate, and arbitrage takes advantage of this. And arbitrate markets don't even necessarily track new RAM prices, if someone dumps a bunch of used LPDDR devices in China, people may harvest used memory for arbitrage.
For example, lets say they plan for how many people want to actually buy a 1GB Pi 5. Then they produce that amount. Then scalpers (hypothetically) realize they scape old RAM off discarded cable TV boxes for less than the OEM pays for new RAM. Then the legitimate 1GB Pis will be quickly scalped up off the market, and the market will be flooded with modified boards of higher capacities.
well, of course people are still "learning to program" it's just everyone gets to be sitting in the chair of an academic or the start up chair, or whatever.
Since they're still improving models, they still are learning how to program, it's just a meta game now, not the specific intricacies.
My 4 is, but only after a good while as my home server until I bumped up against the limitations of the hardware and upgraded to a proper server. So I suppose it did its job as a home lab gateway drug.
Yeah, currently I have a 3B, 2B and an original wifi-free zero in a drawer.
The 3B was my Octoprint server for the longest time while I was testing the 4B for a product, but for reasons I don't really understand, the 3B isn't quite punchy enough for Klipper, when it fully should be; it drops connections to the printer. I think any of them may continue to have some uses but perhaps not till I move to a new place.
Haven't gone for a 5B or Zero 2W yet, don't really need to. Rather more interested in what happens with the Picos these days.
It's not as locked down as you might think. I was surprised how easy it was to root a couple of devices, one an old pixel and one a pretty new one
It's definitely a bit odd, the Android environment, but I didn't feel blocked on it. Also ended up unrooting one because termux and the built in debian VM on Android now give everything I need
Termux + X11+ XFCE is surprisingly nice on a vanilla phone
Presumably the only customers buying Pis right now are companies who use them in their products. There are much better options on the used market for people needing small computers/servers.
The prices are crazy, but the uncertainty makes the choices even harder. I have my eyes on a Framework laptop 13 for some time. I was considering buying it with less RAM now, and then buying more RAM later. Now what I fear is: by the time RAM prices become reasonable, we might as well be using DDR7. So, even with a custom-built desktop PC or a Framework laptop it would be a pity to have to upgrade everything. On the other hand, it may well be our new reality, so maybe better buying in into 64GB RAM now? Not even sure if my reasoning is correct.
Guessing you don't actually need it and you're just thinking of getting it for fun? Because if you need one and you only need 32GB of ram today then you could just buy that for now and pay the cost of upgrading whatever the ram price is in the future if you need to. And if you last until the DDR7 days when ram prices finally go down then great, you saved by not getting the full 64 GB
The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
Not in my area at least. People gut the RAM from them now to sell separately for profit, and often the HDD too for privacy, so you're basically buying a paper weight that's a motherboard in a shell.
There's laptops or X86 tablets with soldered RAM but those are rare and vanish immediately if they show up at a good price.
Several methods. You can run a MQTT server, Lightweight HTTP Server or even just serial over USB. Literally the world is your oyster. Extra special points if you do HTTP over ethernet
If you’re in the U.S - look into Walmart’s ONN boxes. They’re cheap and have great performance. Specifically the ONN 4k pro. They’re not even bloated with apps. The apps that are installed can easily be removed. In addition, easy to side load apps and customize.
The X96 Max Plus has excellent Linux support (S905X3, 4 core A53 @ 1.9 GHz, decent GPU), 1GB NIC, 4GB memory 1X USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0. It's what I'm eyeing at the moment.
They currently go for ~60 USD which steep compared to the pre-ram crisis prices but nothing crazy.
For comparison sake, you can find a few really high-end routers that are faster but most are a lot less powerful than this.
The CPU/GPU actually allows you to emulate a fair amount, up to N64, PSP and Dreamcast (but definitely with some compromise) so they function great as retroboxes as well.
They sip power and run great as a small homeserver. You can even use them as a NAS for media (that you're willing to lose since you won't be running any form of RAID with 1 USB 3.0 port).
I did the opposite. I built an x86 version of Android TV because typical ARM Android TV boxes are underpowered garbage and the locked bootloaders prevent replacement of the OS. My x86 build on a NUC just flies and is 100% under my control without Google or OEM crapware.
That reminds me how I once dropped my phone into a vat of industrial solvent; not for very long, but enough for just a drop or so to enter via the charging port. The substance gradually separated layers of the screen. Touch worked, but the big black blob in the OLED eventually overtook the entire screen. Before it went completely dark, I enabled screenshot upload (aside from camera roll) to Dropbox. Then it was just a matter of taking screenshots and measured taps to turn the phone into a very fine GSM modem/wi-fi router as I looked into getting another phone.
Rooting with a completely melted screen would be a little harder, but hey, maybe rooting could be done by following the instructions step-by-step with a little faith, and then post-root the USB might work with an external portable monitor? I'm sure it's a solvable problem.
There is Android TalkBack (for poor vision) which is available on first boot/factory reset that narrates the menu. Even with a completely broken screen you can get ADB set up.
That's very creative actually. Might be quite dated but most of the workarounds I've heard of involve plugging in a OTG cable that supports display-out and a mouse.
>The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
My family (n=3) owned the Huawei P20 Pro (acquired at the same time in the same promo, perhaps the same batch?). This product line seems to have serious issues with battery swelling. Each phone had spicy pillows at some point within 2 years of ownership. Even outside the warranty period, Huawei was willing to replace the battery at their cost, at their contracted Toronto repair centre. Each of the repaired phones had their spicy pillows return within 6-9 months. Huawei was still willing to repair the phones, but at that point I'd rather have recycled it. I strongly suspect Huawei was avoiding doing a voluntary recall and triaging it through their RMA process, given how little resistance their customer support put up (they immediately sent back an RMA label without requiring any pictures).
FWIW I have a P30 Pro that I used for 5 years without a hitch, and still sits fully functioning in a box serving as a backup in case my current phone gets damaged. So that generation likely did not have the same issue.
Doesn't Android have rather aggressive battery saving features which kill processes and put the phone to sleep after so long of being idle? Is there an easy way around that?
The battery is a free built-in UPS and isn't a fire hazard unless the charging electronics were designed spectacularly poorly. The BMS knows to stop charging the battery when it's full. All of these phones probably use the same set of well-known BMS chips, I would imagine.
There are many issues, first termux doesn’t have all packages and struggle to run some common ones. You have pages and pages of workaround in their GitHub.
Secondly, using a device on a battery to run 24/24 is nonsense, you are Puting a lot of work on the battery by constantly getting it at 100% and eventually it will break and with it your data.
Thirdly, these devices have just a usb port. Sometimes usb 2.0. What you gonna do when the 128gb is filled up ?
You know, a RPi 5 1GB is $77, 4GB is $109, 8GB is $170 and 16GB is $385. None of it makes sense, especially if anyone starts a reballing shop.
I was looking to try out Joel's TrueNAS on ARM this time with a Pi 5, a PoE and NVMe Hat ... I decided against it and ended up getting a good old cheap x86 compact NAS instead.
This was shipped for a very long time because some retailers were just soldering RAM and selling these off. There's plenty other interesting things going on.
I'd take the old firmware and just update memory chips when I need to; Better to replace them and keep them running for a long time.
It also has twice the RAM of the original Raspberry Pi (at launch), plus WiFi, plus a lot of CPU power, and a powerful GPU, and a lot more.
I have a 16GB model and I use that much RAM for some specific development work on the Raspberry Pi platform, but now I wish they had never announced the 16GB model. It has created so many complaints from people who shouldn't and won't be buying it.
It depends a lot on your use case. For headless stuff (automation that mostly uses the GPIO, for instance, or running a few "old school" server processes), you usually don't need that much RAM. However, when used as desktop computers, 8GB becomes the bare minimum to run a modern Web browser with a few tabs...
It started at $35/unit, in the United States at least. I've still got the invoice for my 256MB Model B...
$35 today gets you a 1GB Pi 4 Model B. For somebody who actually needs the form factor, it's pretty much a fine value.
For somebody who wants a server, it's always been a weird choice. (sorry Jeff :D )
For somebody who wants a desktop, the Raspberry Pi 500+ was a really fun choice when I bought mine in January. They cost twice as much today, which is sad. (although if anyone is feeling the desire and lives near a store, Microcenter has them on sale for $100 off...)
ESP32 devices are still cheap enough but with a less-good ecosystems due to the Pi's popularity. I do plan on picking up a few Pi 2 Ws which are still selling at a MicroCenter near me for $18 with only three bucks of markup just for setting up a Pi-Hole and some other IoT project but yeah, looking at even the Chinese made boards like Raspberry Orange sees prices north of $70 which is just not worth it for something with this capability. At this point, why not just get a refurb'd thin client or mini-pc?
Esp32 is pretty damn powerful for the cost. We have one driving a display and keyboard, speaking and playing synthesize sounds through attached sound chip, driving an ADC over SPI at a high rate and talking Bluetooth to an attached device and talking wifi to the cloud. On a device that costs a few bucks.
As a 53 year old, I've been starting to feel like there's a very real chance I will never buy another brand new computer (for personal use), phone or gaming console in my lifetime, which would be very surprising if you told this to me ~2 years ago.
If my computer fails, I have plenty of old components from older systems that I can swap in. I also have quite a few old phones (my primary job over the past decade has been Android development, so I have older test devices that still function fine for my purposes). And consoles are just very optional (and way more costly than I am willing to pay) when they start costing $1500+.
Overall there are some positives from this, I'll be responsible for less e-waste. This is something I always tried to be cognizant of in the first place, but the economics will really force my hand even more.
Of course, things aren't all that great considering we got into this situation due to technology running in large datacenters running on lots of dirty power like methane turbines.
If you need GPIO pins, ESP32 is good enough for lots of use cases. If you just need a small low-power PC, used enterprise thin clients and mini-pc's (google project tinyminimicro) offer more while still idling around 10W or less. Those can be still bought for like 40-100 USD with SSD and 8GB or more RAM included.
I think Raspberry Pi is worth it only for some niche use-cases with current prices.
Unless they're part of the executive branch that order doesn't apply. (Which is kind of too bad, under the "if it actually works it gets a name and isn't AI anymore" rules we need a new name... but This Isn't It.)
Sure... but... the original $35 RasPi is closer to a modern RasPi Zero 1, which looks like it's selling for $45 - $50 on Amazon.
Modern top-of-the-line RasPis seem more like ARM PCs with fast, efficient multi-core CPUs and GigE. I bought a RasPi 500 at the beginning of the year just to see what it was like and it's my new "email and light web browsing" daily-driver. Though yeah, I probably wouldn't have paid $410 for it.
I bought my original RasPi mostly for the I/O. I wanted to blink some lights, drive some servos. And if I wanted to do that again, I would probably buy a Pico or Zero.
You would think... but if you don't have to run the 13 year old computer at full tilt, then the power difference may be minimal. The LEON SoS SPARC clones I used wound up consuming MUCH less power than modern intel cores.
And CPU power consumption is only part of the whole system. And a lot of the system power scales with bus speed rather than inverse CPU age. It's possible recent systems will consume more electrons than older systems.
>but if you don't have to run the 13 year old computer at full tilt
Except that modern apps and modern websites can be so demanding compared to their vintage counterparts, that they'll rev an old CPU at full tilt for basic modern tasks, while for a new CPU will seem to be idling at the same tasks.
Just try watching 1080p AV1 youtube videos on a vintage CPU vs one with dedicated AV1 decoder and you'll see what I mean. Yes I know h264ify exists, but its existence only reinforces my point.
I have an core 2 quad CPU at my parents place and simply browsing the web (with adblocking enabled even) pegs it at 100% most of the time sucking >90W. Meanwhile a mid level android phone barely breaks a sweat sipping battery on the same tasks.
I don't run web browsers on my satellites or missile control systems. Guess we all have different applications. I also run most of my apps from the command line in the terminal. I just don't use the modern web that much.
I have a 60 year old computer attached to my Minuteman III and it's doing fine. A 13 year old computer that still works is a computer that still works. And if it's worked 13 years, then it might last another 13 years (unlike the Intel NUC that died after 18 months.)
When you say, "my" do you mean "my personal property" and by "Minuteman III" are we talking about the missile?
Ignoring all of that for a second, and focusing on the generalized sentiment:
I have a 60 year old computer attached to my
[...] and it's doing fine
Well, I'm a huge fan of that, but that seems like a fixed-purpose system. What a lot of people want from personal computers is the flexibility of doing fun and new things: new software, games, whatever.
Even "browsing the web" is (highly unfortunately) not a fixed purpose, as web standards evolve and pages (highly unfortunately) get heavier and more JS-dependent.
Yeah, but the pages that use all the new fangled stuff are pages I don't really use. I'm sort of a fan of text. Whenever I have to launch X and start a modern browser, it sort of hurts my eyes. Whenever I want to do something fun, I launch MacOS 9 on my G3 iBook and monkey around with Hypercard. It runs just fine.
Absolutely. Amazon isn't the go-to place to pick up electronics. I think I picked it because prices there are probably the highest you'll reasonably find for Pi stuff. Though they often have availability when everyone else is out of stock (likely because they have a bit more mark up than most everyone else.)
If you just want a computer, an Ayn Thor is +$90. It comes with 1TB of UFS 3.1 storage, not one but two fantastic OLED screens, nice joysticks, speakers, and it's much much much faster.
And it runs a fantastic CachyOS (a super tuned Arch) install, called ArmadaOS,
https://armadaos.dev/
2026 has been pretty amazing, with the slow work upstreaming Qualcomm support really building. A bunch of really great chipsets have mainline support and actually work. The Thor is a bit behind SM8550, but SM8650 and SM8750 handhelds are also available (just a bit pricier, and non-dual screen yet).
Alas most phones don't have unlockable boot loaders. I'm anti-interested in the sad experience of Android, being unable to read my own files off my device. I really want to be able to read my chrome profile data, for reasons. Absolutely no go.
I'd much rather buy a 5 year old mini Dell (or Nuc or whatever) that I can reliably put Linux on than some kind of one-off thing like this.
Call me cynical after being burned countless times on niche-ass platforms. Even my Framework 13" has a flurry of issues I've never seen on more mainstream hardware. Life is too short to worry about bizarre firmware issues in hardware that no one is paid to support.
There's plenty of reason to be conservative and that's a solid recommendation. My own i5-8600t nuc continues to tick away!
I for one am delighted that you can buy a modern-ish high performance, advanced processing node based system, that's small, that has such incredible capabilities, that's super power efficient. And that finally it runs a mean Linux!
Unless you have a true, irreplaceable need for a 16GB model, everyone should just pretend they don't exist.
Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at. Now that the people who need a desktop or server have re-discovered that they're better off using an actual desktop or an actual server for their purposes, we should get back to treating these like embedded systems boards.
> Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
Oh yup... I'm running unbound (DNS resolver) at home 24/7 on a Pi 3 from 2015 since years and years. Zero issue. I run that on a Pi because that one really needs to be on 24/7 and hardly consumes any resources (I mean: it's just DNS queries). But a Pi simply ain't good for much more than that.
> I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
I fully agree. For the proper stuff I encourage anyone to buy used enterprise gear with proper RAM (i.e. ECC RAM) and a proper CPU (like a Xeon).
I've got four NUCs too but the real workhorse is a used Xeon with ECC RAM.
> The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at.
I agree. I've got like seven Pi (I was an early adopter of those) but don't ever plan to buy another.
It's like you said: they lost the plot (not just the community: those who make them too).
Depends. "Old enterprise gear" doesn't necessarily mean a server or full tower dual-socket workstation. Minitower and even small form factor workstations exist with single-socket Xeon, ECC, and single-slot GPUs that aren't going to use much more power than a comparable desktop PC (which is the use case th GP has in mind).
> because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The thing is, they are all x86. The currently available ways to get an ARM general purpose computer are... Raspberry, Raspberry clones of various degrees of shittyness, Apple's lineup and a few Chromebooks plus even rarer Windows systems that no one wants because nothing runs on them.
> Windows systems that no one wants because nothing runs on them
You might want to give Windows on Arm another spin if you haven't touched it lately, because you're either operating on very outdated information or you work in a very narrow field. Everything I tried throwing at it runs on mine. Exceptions are some drivers and kernel mode anticheat in games.
They got 3% of market share [1]. That's laughable, no one tests for that, and I personally won't touch Qualcomm crap with a ten foot pole if I can avoid it.
x86 is generally better, because it's a standardized platform that is universally supported. With ARM you inevitably run into headaches if you expect to run an OS that isn't provided by the manufacturer.
You actually get a surprising amount of this on x86 too. When I last upgraded my computer and plugged in my old hard drive to boot, it came up in single-core mode until I recompiled Linux with x2APIC support.
The difference, of course, is that it did come up. If an ARM system was incompatible like that it would have just blackscreened.
Exactly. ARM server motherboards do exist on the open market, though they're quite expensive. I picked up a pair of the 16GB RPis for a buildhost. In that release thread, someone had chimed in the same kind of "ignore the 16GB model" advice. I'm sure glad I ignored it back when they were only $120!
A price increase in one market can displace demand to other markets.
A workstation user or gamer might want a desktop PC loaded with DDR5. But they'll also consider a desktop with DDR4 or even a laptop with LPDDR4X if they get more for their money.
So a rise in demand/prices for DDR5 can trigger a lesser rise in demand/prices for LPDDR4X
That's a good point that I had not considered, thanks.
It's a surprise bonanza for the low-end RAM producers. Raise prices substantially with no new investment needed. Some of these factories must have paid for themselves years ago.
> Is there a lot of new demand for the kind of RAM on a RPi?
Yes. Due to the way the RPi board is laid out, they can only support one DRAM chip. And 16 Gb modules are the most expensive ones available, they are the ones that go onto 128Gb and 256Gb sticks.
Right, and I learned in this thread that the same wafer processes are used to make these as the globally bottlenecked HBM chips in NVIDIA servers. It's a shame that hobbyists are competing with Big AI for these factory lines.
When one guy (or three) buy (or pinky promise to buy) your whole stock, and the rest of prospective buyers (a lot of them) cannot afford it, it's not "demand" as such.
The cost of 16GB Raspberry Pi is driven by the RAM. Everything else is a small addition to the BOM cost.
The 16GB was introduced when it was affordable. Now it's just becoming a mental obstacle for buyers who think they should only purchase something if they can get the top model. That's why I suggest everyone pretend it doesn't exist. Unless you really need it for something, the 4GB or 8GB can do most things.
Yep, the small form factor market is amazing now. A cheap N100 blows any RPi away and will be similar in cost and power consumption. You also get nifty things like a semi-usable iGPU and QuickSync which is perfect for transcoding.
The 1GB RPI4 can definitely not be used as a main desktop. I make my son use a Raspberry Pi 5 with 4GB of RAM to code simple stuff for school, and it's barely usable because the UI is extremely laggy.
Maybe you could get a bit more perf out of it using a lighter environment. Sway and a terminal text editor (if vim is too much for your son, maybe micro would be better for its CUA binds) would probably run well. Avoid the web browser, or maybe try a lighter one like w3m.
When python crypto switched to a rust/cargo build process my installation script suddenly started to run out of memory on an Orange Pi, I forget if it was 1 2 or 4GB. I ended up having to run the build script in an emulator on my laptop before writing the image to the SD card. Armbian made it pretty simple but that was an annoying speed bump.
People are irrationally obsessed with the idea of a very small cheap computer that could replace their laptop or desktop, for no reason.
If you created a little cube the size of an Apple Watch with built in WiFi and Bluetooth, and maybe put a little LED screen on it, and it could run Linux and could be powered with POE and USB-C or something, people would feel an urge to just buy one, with no real use case for it.
The RPI was really good because it was a powerful SOC that ran Linux with lots of GPIO and easy to operate. Now there are a dime a dozen ESP32 based projects that give you the same flexibility. You should almost never buy a RPI for projects these days, its completely overkill
I was confused the other day when I was browsing ESP32 on Aliexpress and found models with a price tag of 30~60 euros instead of a couple of bucks. So those models have enough silicon to run a general full fledged OS. Picture me impressed!
As the sibling comment shows, the very latest ESP32 model (S31, not S3) can run Linux. But they can only access maybe 64MB of RAM, and most boards for sale will have significantly less.
In reality, though, the use cases where you need Linux and GPIO are very slim. It's overkill, an ESP32 is realistically more than powerful enough, and Linux isn't even good for GPIO.
On ESP32, its also quite fine to run FreeRTOS, and you can quite reasonably write cross-platform code which runs on both FreeRTOS and Linux, if that's important.
For a long time, this was the pivot point between a microcontroller and a bigger machine: Does it need to run an OS?
I've had a couple of RPI's running as home file servers for well over a decade with the only reboots being due to power failures. But today, the cost sensitive option would be a refurbished mini-PC.
Unless you designed a product around the RPI as your compute module, and now you're stuck. I was recently at the contract manufacturer that's building my company's product - they have a number of clients in this situation.
You could respin, but you can't get that Broadcom part because Fuck You, We're Broadcom™. So now you're looking at a whole new platform if you want to proceed. It's still cheaper to pay loanshark prices for RPIs... for now.
Welp there's been about a decade of warning between the Acquisition of Broadcom by Avago, and almost a half decade since they settled an anti-competitive claim around, surprise surprise, restrictive contract terms.
IDK why anyone would build a full product around one, versus the more sensible option of maybe prototyping with one while planning a shift, whether it's the 'Version 2' or something. Anything other than dependence in a full platform when half the point of ARM was how easy it is to get your own semi-custom spin.
There's a gray area in the middle where people want a Linux system in their design but just don't have the time or resources to spin a SOM carrier, or even know where to start. And then they see how people are using RPIs to drive 3D printers or robots or funny things and it just looks so easy. And it is. And I sympathize with them. But commercializing a product with it is dangerous, as we're now seeing.
I was recently surprised to learn that even my massive tower workstation has GPIOs in it - they're just not exposed to the outside. But all of the unused pins on the Super I/O chip for COM, LPT, floppy, etc, can be set to GPIO mode by setting a register bit.
More practically, if you don't have tight timing requirements (which a lot of the time you do, but not always) you can get a USB adapter and plug it into some random laptop.
You probably don't remember this magic period of time when PCs had a parallel printer port. If you knew what you were doing it was a tidy bank of GPIOs that were really useful. And then we got rid of it.
They're all nice products and there's so so many more out there, but you would need a complete switcharoo on the kernel and devicetree and it's going to cause some pain.
> You could respin, but you can't get that Broadcom part because Fuck You, We're Broadcom™. So now you're looking at a whole new platform if you want to proceed. It's still cheaper to pay loanshark prices for RPIs... for now.
Beaglebone Blacks have and continue to exist. They were actually open and documented. They genuinely fit in their advertised power envelope. They have more and better I/O than an RPi. Had people used those, RPi would be a memory and Broadcom wouldn't be an issue.
Instead, everybody flocked to the RPi because it was subsidized and now have shocked pickachu face that things are expensive now that subsidies have been withdrawn because people want profit and/or can't keep up with RAM prices. ╮(°᎑°)╭
Broadcom is a known adversarial player to EVERYBODY. I feel zero pity for anyone who continues to use them and get burned. ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
I've been having that argument with RPi fans since the start, but it was hard to beat the price and support ecosystem that sprang up around it. Kind of like a hot dog - you don't ask how it got there and why it's cheap.
Later down the road when they still bitched about lack of documentation, or a viable bootloader that didn't need that silly GPU, or how to mount eMMC instead of SD cards that constantly fell out...they still didn't want to leave it.
I admire the project for bringing more people into embedded Linux, I just wish it was closer to the economics of how this business works.
For the record I'm a AM335x (Beagle) user and it's worked out just fine for me. Thankfully the Beagle community was a bit better than some of the other SOM vendors out there. And the Octavo SIP version is a nice thing to whip into a design when you need it. And I do like Freescale's iMX as well, that was where I got my start.
I remember a while ago seeing a lot of diy projects that were using raspberry pis when an Arduino or ESP32 was more than capable of being the controller in the project. Things that don’t require an os, just some control logic. At least that’s no longer an issue.
The RPI was good because, like the Asus EEEEeeeeee that started the netbook/*book revolution where the original kinda sucked but the later derivatives by other vendors were great, it showed that you could build a product that fitted somewhere between an ESP32 and a mini-PC and be successful with it, kickstarting an entire industry of better-designed and better-priced alternatives. So it doesn't really matter so much if they've gone off into the weeds when there are large number of alternatives available.
I just got a Minisforum UM870 Slim with AMD Ryzen™ 7 8745H for €304 (taxes included + €30 shipping), and sourced locally used SODIMM DDR5 RAM at ~120 EUR for 16GB: I'd certainly take a full-fledged mini PC at 450 EUR than a Pi at 385 USD + VAT + customs fee (pretty much the same price most likely).
Yes, I'm missing an NVMe SSD in there too, but I've got a bunch of older 512GB drives around from upgraded computers.
Power usage is probably lower on the Pi5, but likely not by much anymore in the idle state.
Indeed — but just a playful statement how many of these sticks being resold were actually bought at reasonable prices back in the day.
I also bought that 2x48GB set for... checking Amazon order history... $280 back in 2024, and I thought I was _splurging_ for the max my mini PC could take: it's listed at $1699 today :O
Yeah, I recently also bought DDR5 (new!) as I figured the prices won't be dropping significantly in 2 years so it won't matter if I delay buying a new PC. Had to basically just ignore the RAM price (one can try...), just look at the price of the whole upgrade and not think about how much cheaper it would have been previously :). A new reality, but hopefully not for long.
What about just a normal computer and an arduino you talk to over serial? Unless you have some reason to toggel GPIOs stupid fast or use the dedicated RPIO stuff, you would be surprised how much a good old ATMega can do
I can set up raspberry pi in matter of minutes to do what I want. Then I expect someone without experience being able to set up RPi in like an hour with help from the internet.
Arduino not so much. Maybe with AI it would be faster for me.
I have a Raspberry Pi 500 I regularly use as personal admin computer, it is great and just works for all the things you can do with a personal computer.
That's not to say I don't have much beefier work computers - I do - but for the rPi 500 is a perfectly cromulent home computer. It's a computer. I just plug it in, it works.
I'm honestly not even sure what a good use case is for a Raspberry Pi proper at this point. It sits somewhat awkwardly between things that microcontrollers can handle(*) and things that, as you mentioned, NUCs or old computers or used laptops (or even used phones!) with removed batteries can handle.
*: I am so glad we're finally out of the phase where people were using Pis for hobbyist tasks where an Arduino would have worked just fine. Especially now that there are so many cheap, accessible microcontrollers. ESP32s obviously, but Raspberry's own RP2040/RP2350 have been more useful to me than the Pis themselves ever were.
I've been buying new-in-box Pi 3Bs to run snapcast speakers around my house and host various sensors and physical switches. Honestly they're probably overkill, and I'm not even using GPIO.
My two Pi 3B+ are my TVs. They have a TV hat which decodes DVB 2 and tvheadend which streams channels. Then I use the Android clients on my phone and tablets over 5 GHz Wi-Fi to look at free to air channels. The clients do the channel selection part, then I watch the streams with VLC. I think that I could vibe code a simple web UI (tvheadend web UI is not simple)
In this way I have a TV that follows me around my house. I'm not stuck in a place to watch it. It's mostly for news and sports. Movies, YouTube etc are on phone and tablets anyway. A better smart TV mostly on my own terms.
I ended up buying a used Lenovo Mini PC for $200 from a local seller, found on Facebook. It's an i7 something or other with 32GB RAM, I think I got pretty lucky with the find. Much cheaper than a Raspberry Pi considering I didn't need the pins anyway.
If you do need something like a raspberry pi I think the Arduino Uno Q is a solid choice. The 4 GB RAM variant is iirc $80 or so.
I think you're right.
The 4B 8GB is the sweet spot for me.
Each new model draws more power, and the 4B was the earliest one with the combo of >1GB RAM, boot from USB, and gigabit Ethernet.
I use it as a mini NAS to avoid powering up my Synology too often (crazy electricity prices here).
It runs Tailscale, Samba, Docker, Postgres+pgbackrest, nginx, Pihole, and some bespoke apps I developed. Just looking at htop, I could probably get away with the 4GB model, but I wanted plenty of scope for adding more custom webapps and services like HomeAssistant.
At the moment, I'm using an iPad as a glorified USB audio mixer (with an external audio interface and the AUM – Audio Mixer app). It feels like overkill, and I'm pretty sure my Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB of RAM could easily handle the job, including some filtering and audio effects.
I'm currently using an RME Babyface Pro, one of the nicest USB audio interfaces I've had the pleasure to use, in standalone mode with no USB connection at all as a glorified headphone amp for my phono preamp and HDMI audio via my display's S/PDIF output.
> Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
I'm sick and tired of this memory austerity. Don't go blaming consumers for issues that the ai companies caused. I should be allowed to want a 32GB rpi5 for €75.
it's like everyone simultaneously forgot that computers can multi-task. Maybe it was the launch of the iphone/ipads that caused this?
my answer:
i'd run an OS on ram, snapshot to an nvme periodically and still have enough ram for redis/sqlite/CI/build tools/ docker+network watchdogs/misc services..
.. AND STILL have enough ram to throw an 8b toy llm in there for good measure with a large context..
..at 5w.
if we get permitted to add a hailo board on top of that mythical 64gb rpi then a lot more fun opens up.
mind you my plans wouldnt change much if you said it was an intel N150 with 64gb of ram or some such, aside from the omission of the hailo hat.
If the CPU was more capable on the rpi5 i'd lean to VM host. If the GPU was more capable i'd lean to transcoding/caching system for a home media setup.
To be fair, it was a good option as a first home server for self hosting something lightweight, that was in the days when it cost about the same as a used NUC or even less.
I originally got it for more advanced embedded projects but eventually it was what started my journey on self hosting.
The 16GB pricing is just a symptom of the wider issue. We went with used Pi 3s because the price second-hand is almost what a new low-memory Pi used to cost.
For a basic home server, the Pi does ok on a trickle of watt-hours, whereas our home server hogs 12Wh just to be alive. So these dev boards still serve a purpose in many ways, but they’re all very expensive now, 16GB of RAM notwithstanding.
I keep thinking that the AI gold rush is not an AI gold rush at all. It is a way to monopolize computing in 2 steps:
1) AI really does require a scaleup in compute power. In other words: you will be upgrading your hardware or use old software (at least if you want to run local or host your own saas)
2) the AI buildout means you can't buy the hardware, you can only rent it "in the cloud", because the AI buildout makes everything too expensive. Including memory, a nonnegotiable component of any computer or server
It only works, of course, if Amazon and Google and Meta and ... keep buying for another 2-3 years but that seems to be exactly what's happening.
Worst of all: monopolies used to at least require investment. But Amazon and Google aren't investing, really. They're still net profitable companies. It's almost insulting.
Classical monopoly (or duopoly) requires a moat. This is the moat they build. Everyone will just rent centralized intelligence - that's a promise to investors.
Yeah, but the key here is: the moat is not AI at all! The moat is they're buying all new computers (the key components). Every last one. So you can't buy one, you will be renting one, at seriously increased prices.
That's an interesting take. I had a similar thought about safety and how AI providers propagate that using cloud options is safer because hosting a server is open to attack vectors, and who would manage that best if not the big providers themselves.
The fact that Hugging Face was attacked not by a small amount of compute but such a vast amount of computation. It was only possible because its already so centralized by Open AI.
It feels a bit like cyberpunk where only the big companies in reality will have the resource to pull of such an attack.
It will stop when the data center bubble bursts. Right now a small group of companies are borrowing huge amounts of money to corner the market in compute in order to use it for AI. But there's no evidence that real AI revenue (as opposed to more borrowed money) will grow fast enough for them to pay for that debt, or that profit margins will be sufficient to make it worth it over the window they need to start recouping. When that realization hits the lenders and investors and the capital spigot shuts off, prices will crash. I think it will be very similar to a precious metals run-up.
I have a little Linux box that I've been trying to use more frequently instead of my MacBook. Partially just for fun, partially because I want to decouple a little bit from the Apple ecosystem.
I was having a ton of stability issues: my filesystem would randomly go read-only after a few minutes. After trawling through my system logs, Claude suggested that it was a memory issue. I ran MemTest86 and it bailed out after 10,000 errors.
So now I was very depressed because RAM prices are sky-high and I currently cannot justify spending ~$150---more than what I paid for when I got this box used off of Ebay mind you---to replace the RAM inside.
Then I remembered my wife had an old laptop she hasn't touched in years lying around. I popped it open and, lo and behold, the RAM was compatible! I felt very fortunate that I was able to do that. Thoughts and prayers for all the folks who need memory---I've felt the despair.
RPi Foundation decided who their customers were during and after the pandemic, no doubt thanks to years of community goodwill put into an increasingly uncompetitive product, especially so now. The good thing is the world moved on, there's tons of alternatives, and you really should look elsewhere and also past SBCs for anything with that much RAM.
I don't mean this with snark, but who did they land on? I have struggled to place the Pi for a long time because the range of things it can do is so broad, but then it gets limited by things like using an SD card for primary storage (which can fail). So while this could be a perfectly good home server, I wouldn't be able to rely on the boot drive. It also makes a really good first computer, but leaving it naked doesn't mean I can slot it in front of my kiddos and hope they'll be fine. I keep a Pi running attached to a monitor in my kitchen running a Home Assistant dashboard, and that's pretty good, but is that the sweet spot?
The Pi 5 (and 4?) can boot from external hard drives, including NVMe SSDs over PCIe. Granted, you're limited to PCIe 2.0 x1 (~1 Gb/s) or USB 3 (5 Gb/s), but the point still stands.
The thing with DDR3 RAM is as I understand it not really an "also". It's not that they are made differently it's just that the demand for "the best" RAM is so high that all production is going there. The DDR3 market isn't just as willing to pay such a markup.
Makes sense. I have a few old servers I still have running as CI runners, recently dished out more for 32gb of DDR3 than I did for equivalent DDR4 back in 2021. :(
Attaching 16 GB of precious RAM to that cheap weak SoC is, at this point, a waste of resources. The original idea was - cheap SoC + cheap RAM = cheap SBC. The SoC is still cheap and crappy but the RAM is now worth so much more. The pairing no longer makes any practical sense.
Multiple theories have spawned regarding the usage, I strongly suspect that they are being used in drones for military purposes, hence the shortage at some point and the prices that are skyrocketing.
I have been buying and using Raspberry Pi 400 (Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 ARM v8 64-bit SoC running at 1.8 GHz, 4GB LPDDR4-3200 RAM) that goes from $50 to $39 (Microcenter yesterday). One can do a lot with this.
For everything else, either go lower level with ESP32 or higher level with a mini pc.
Yeah, this is ridiculous - I am a long term Sailfosh OS user nad of course, when Jolla, the company behind it (of Nokia/Maemo/Meego fame) after fighting of at least 2 bankruptcies over the years finally releases new phone (they were selling SFOS licenses for Sony phones in the meantime) this insanity has to happen, forcing them to make their baby more expensive. :P
You'll be told its the RAM price, but Amazon can deliver qty 1 of an equivalent speed ram (its technically slightly faster than DDR4 but much slower than DDR5) to my door tomorrow morning with sales tax for about $120. No one can explain why the other parts cost about $300. Note that "about $300" will buy you a 24 core Intel Ultra 7, the Amazon model is $350 because its unlocked for overclocking for those who don't think 24 cores at 3.7 GHz is fast enough. I'm sure the RasPi is much faster LOL.
You'll be told its the price of PCBs and chips, but again, the same company can deliver a box of three Xiao brand ESP32 dev boards to my door tomorrow morning for a hair over $20 including tax and shipping and handling.
You'll be told its a temporary supply chain disruption until you remember they've been pulling that scam for some years now, and as long as people fall for it and throw money at them, they'll keep pushing it.
The problem is they sold out to the hardcover textbook manufacturer business model. Take the head of the EE dept out for dinner and box seats at last night's sportsball game, suspiciously the EE department syllabus now says you need to buy it or else, and the seller says now that its a mandatory purchase "will pay anything for an education" in response they will charge "anything" which apparently is $385. See also Boomers and "will pay anything for medical care" well they know that and wait until you see the bill LOL. Also see real estate bubbles.
I don't see why they don't raise the price to that of an Apple Neo laptop. Its the same market and business model, pay what we ask or die uneducated and unemployed under a freeway overpass. Don't you want your kids to learn STEM and be successful? Well that'll be $385. Its the new "World Book Encyclopedia" scam.
About half a year ago, I bought a new Chuwi Minibook X with Intel N150 CPU, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for less than that. AFAIK, it's still available for about the same price, and it seems like a lot more value for the money.
I cannot emphasize this enough: if you actually care about performance, forget about 16GB vs 8GB and switch from using the internal SD card and to an external SSD. I wrote up my experience at https://honeypot.net/2023/03/20/upgrade-your-raspberry.html
Once you've done that, and your max latency has dropped to 0.7% of what it use to be (yes, really, the SD card had 140x higher latency than the SSD on my system), carve out 32GB for swap and call it done. This will give you vastly better throughput on any likely use case that's not purely dependent on RAM size alone.
If I were using this as a portable desktop system, like I am with my uConsole, I'd rather have 4GB of RAM and fast storage than 16GB and the SD card. One of them is fine, just a little sluggish sometimes. The other is pretty nice, until it grinds to a halt for minutes at a time. If `apt upgrade` is your benchmark, SSD >> RAM by a wide margin.
Yes, that's what people use to say before they did the math. I have an 8GB Pi with 32GB of swap. I'm currently using 60MB of it. But even if I were hitting it hard, it would take a lot of writes to it before the wear leveling gave up and started throwing SMART warnings. I'm not routinely rebuilding all of Gentoo or something. I just want some extra room to grow on those rare occasions that I need it.
What do y'all recommend using for embedded products and appliances instead of Raspberry Pis?
The Pi (and the CM in particular) has become a popular base system to build products like touchscreen appliances, control panels, etc. on, because it is (or at least used to be) cheaper than traditional industrial controllers and NUCs. Also Pis can be sourced reliably and in large numbers (probably even decades into the future).
I'm not looking for the usual "buy a used laptop/phone/NUC" recommendation. That stuff makes sense for hobby projects, but it's obviously too janky to build products around.
So what would y'all use? I'm looking for something that supports Linux, is reasonably priced, and available in large volume long-term.
Not to ruin my source of SBPC replacements, but HPE thin clients can be a good option. The CPU is even weaker than an RPi, generally 2-4GB of RAM, however the peripherals are better, the storage is generally SATA or NVMe so less chance of data corruption, and it's a standard BIOS/UEFI setup that will run most x86 distros no problem. I run Alpine on one as a 3D print server and it handles Klipper/Moonraker/Mainsail without even breaking a sweat. They can be obtained from corporate hardware liquidators from $30-80 depending on the model and specs.
The downside is that it won't just run all the Raspbian images that float around, which is IMO the main selling point of a RasPi: a unified hardware platform that a non-technical user can just burn an image for and go.
I have probably a dozen raspberry pis from the first version through version 3. They all sit in boxes. There is nothing that can't be performed better by an esp32, old laptop, or Intel NUC or whatever the current equivalent is. I've found them to be super unreliable even when using their recommended power sources and moving off SD card. Better off with a real computer or esp32 every time. If you need something small and powerful, an old smart phone is another option. No way I'd ever pay this much for a pi
raspberry pi is a very specialized piece of hardware. pis were used for "homelab" aka pure compute purely bc of price previously. the software support wasn't even that good. the main reason to get a pi is to have a linux environment, with GPIO, in a small form factor, and decent open source software support.
for stuff like running vms or other pure compute homelabs, folks should stop using raspberry pis, and just go the used pc route
Haven't the Raspberry Pi became a meme since years ago?
More expensive hardware for no significant advantages other than the brand, way before the AI hype started.
Raspi 3 with 1GB was the last big one I bought, Zero2W the last one overall.
I moved away from using those small boards as servers, totally not worth the hassle. Better use a Mini or Micro ATX board, that already has everything you need onboard.
And if you want to tinker, there are so many cheap devices that contain surprisingly powerful hardware, like old routers, LTE sticks and old thin clients, to just name a few.
I found quite some interesting devices in the dumpster at work, and now with having cheap AI, it has become easier than ever to hack them.
> there are so many cheap devices that contain surprisingly powerful hardware, like old routers, LTE sticks and old thin clients, to just name a few. I found quite some interesting devices in the dumpster at work, and now with having cheap AI, it has become easier than ever to hack them.
not all "gb" are created equal. these don't use the ddr5 sticks of current-gen computers but rather lpddr4x from last-gen laptops. think pre-covid hardware.
it is insane to me that the older generation stuff is getting hammered like this as well.
also if you check their website, it is interesting to read their motto:
> Whatever your application and whatever your scale, Raspberry Pi offers cost‑effective, high‑performance computing for businesses and the home.
besides the cm5 and the rp2350 listed in the homepage, looks like the org has shifted primary focus to commercial partners today. a true shame.
It's not at all surprising that there is increased demand for older but still passable RAM technologies as people are getting priced out the latest gen.
I’m pleased I bought a pair of them when prices were (in retrospect) “steep but sane”. One is running my radio telescope doing local DSP preprocessing before flooding my network with raw SOAPY packets and then other is on the other end, displaying and tracking and commanding the rotator.
Now it would be a prohibitively expensive luxury. And 128 GB of my Mac Studio??
Maybe in the long run this restriction will do us well, forcing software to stop being so expansive and demanding in terms of memory.
FLeXMurphy | 22 hours ago
Jeremy1026 | 21 hours ago
orthogonal_cube | 22 hours ago
vannevar | 21 hours ago
mxuribe | 21 hours ago
tete | 21 hours ago
airspresso | 21 hours ago
otabdeveloper4 | 20 hours ago
That a good point. Let's hope the RAM hoarding will eventually get us that and not bullshitting hallucination machines.
tmcb | 20 hours ago
onion2k | 19 hours ago
Market bubbles bursting doesn't lead to consumer price drops. The reduced demand from data centres will lead to a reduction in manufacturing rather a lower price.
BeFlatXIII | 18 hours ago
account42 | 3 hours ago
kristopolous | 17 hours ago
There's no substitution good here.
Why would they ever voluntarily lower prices? They've price fixed multiple times.
The new floor is thousands of dollars for something that was $40 last year. Either suck it up or organize and fight back. That's up to you
vannevar | 15 hours ago
Liquidation of data center equipment flooding the used market plus a sharp drop in demand for new chips with the withdrawal of the private stimulus money flowing in from private credit. I don't know that I would call it "voluntary", but I predict that's what's going to happen.
kristopolous | 14 hours ago
Markets can and do enter patterns of HODL'ing blathering idiocy and can stay there indefinitely.
Once consumers think something is some precious thing this is how they react. Whether its handbags with designer logos, a pair of sneakers made for $5, flimsy pieces of paper with baseball players on them, or giant numbers representing cryptographic math solutions, people will irrationally indefinitely prop stupid things up at stratospheric prices forever.
Look at Louis Vuitton or Patek Phillipe watches. They've cost like $500,000 for 200 years (inflation adjustment of course). It's just a watch...
"Computer" has now exited the commodity class and entered that bullshit hoarding class.
The hardware tulip mania could end or it could go on until well after your grandchildren are dead
If you think Samsung hynix or micron will fix it, would they rather have the profits of Gucci or The Gap... They all switched to the scarcity model simultaneously and when a new player comes in like CXMT, they're more than happy to join the cartel and play along.
vannevar | 13 hours ago
throwa356262 | 22 hours ago
I mean, sucks to be a buyer right now but as a developer I like where things are heading :( :)
JKCalhoun | 21 hours ago
pkoird | 22 hours ago
paxy | 21 hours ago
varispeed | 21 hours ago
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/raspberry-pi-ram-lock...
kube-system | 21 hours ago
They have been struggling for years to match supply with demand, and RAM arbitrage would undermine those efforts... and the market would be flooded with flaky boards remanufactured in the cheapest possible way.
Dylan16807 | 20 hours ago
paxy | 20 hours ago
Dylan16807 | 19 hours ago
I also don't see any mention of it in this article?
kube-system | 20 hours ago
But every single day in the meantime, RAM prices will continue fluctuate, and arbitrage takes advantage of this. And arbitrate markets don't even necessarily track new RAM prices, if someone dumps a bunch of used LPDDR devices in China, people may harvest used memory for arbitrage.
For example, lets say they plan for how many people want to actually buy a 1GB Pi 5. Then they produce that amount. Then scalpers (hypothetically) realize they scape old RAM off discarded cable TV boxes for less than the OEM pays for new RAM. Then the legitimate 1GB Pis will be quickly scalped up off the market, and the market will be flooded with modified boards of higher capacities.
philipwhiuk | 21 hours ago
justincormack | 21 hours ago
cyanydeez | 21 hours ago
switchbak | 21 hours ago
But the USA is definitely forcing Deepseek to learn how to write leaner code! Bring it on.
cyanydeez | 19 hours ago
Since they're still improving models, they still are learning how to program, it's just a meta game now, not the specific intricacies.
djhworld | 21 hours ago
the pi5 1GB model is now $45, so with inflation etc that's not too bad considering the feature set.
However, getting your hands on a 1GB model these days is practically impossible unless you go used.
dofm | 6 hours ago
Palomides | 21 hours ago
paxy | 21 hours ago
dofm | 21 hours ago
The Foundation and the Trading Company have different goals, and the Foundation is not wedded to the Linux SBC Pi at all for this.
Physical computing education with Python is more than adequately served by the RP2040 and RP2350, and that is more or less where their focus is.
(Beyond that I think most of this is just geek whining, to be honest.)
Chaosvex | 16 hours ago
sparrish | 21 hours ago
'Our mission is to put high-performance, low-cost, general-purpose computing platforms in the hands of people and organisations all over the world,'
Hard to do that when you keep jacking the prices up.
sdenton4 | 21 hours ago
trevithick | 22 hours ago
dofm | 21 hours ago
OptionX | 21 hours ago
dofm | 21 hours ago
The 3B was my Octoprint server for the longest time while I was testing the 4B for a product, but for reasons I don't really understand, the 3B isn't quite punchy enough for Klipper, when it fully should be; it drops connections to the printer. I think any of them may continue to have some uses but perhaps not till I move to a new place.
Haven't gone for a 5B or Zero 2W yet, don't really need to. Rather more interested in what happens with the Picos these days.
robotmay | 6 hours ago
I think I have one live one running in my house, but I haven’t checked on it in a while and it might actually be dead now.
varispeed | 21 hours ago
Unfortunately there is no appetite for governments to step in.
Levitz | 20 hours ago
undersuit | 18 hours ago
nshm | 22 hours ago
imdsm | 21 hours ago
blharr | 21 hours ago
The development experience of something like Android itself seems super unfriendly for beginners (as someone who is admittedly a beginner to it)
varispeed | 21 hours ago
tete | 21 hours ago
lilbigdoot | 20 hours ago
It's definitely a bit odd, the Android environment, but I didn't feel blocked on it. Also ended up unrooting one because termux and the built in debian VM on Android now give everything I need
Termux + X11+ XFCE is surprisingly nice on a vanilla phone
UncleOxidant | 21 hours ago
ByteOfWood | 21 hours ago
Aurornis | 21 hours ago
Most people realized that the Raspberry Pi was never a great desktop or server replacement a long time ago.
It's an embedded system and it's best when used for embedded applications.
These are still purchased and used by hobbyists, but the people who were trying to use them as servers or desktops are not the target audience.
iLoveOncall | 21 hours ago
alentred | 21 hours ago
subarctic | 19 hours ago
haunter | 21 hours ago
For example I got several broken screen Huawei P20s from 2018, they were 10€ each. 128GB storage with 4GB RAM https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_p20-9107.php
They boot up, you can install termux and then whatever is your choice of Linux software. I run several copyparty instances for friends and family
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/
https://github.com/9001/copyparty
The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
whalesalad | 21 hours ago
busymom0 | 21 hours ago
PorciiVorbesc | 21 hours ago
There's laptops or X86 tablets with soldered RAM but those are rare and vanish immediately if they show up at a good price.
vesrah | 21 hours ago
PorciiVorbesc | 21 hours ago
If you REALLY need GPIO then just add a USB-C OTG MCU board like a ESP32, or even the ancient Arduino Uno works as USB GPIO via serial TTY on Android.
Or just use a ESP32 by itself, if you don't need a full Linux OS, just to toggle some GPIO pins via the internet.
Possibilities are endless. Just use your imagination, or ask some LLM.
thenthenthen | 20 hours ago
vablings | 20 hours ago
ahepp | 20 hours ago
_paulc | 18 hours ago
Adafruit FT232H Breakout - General Purpose USB to GPIO, SPI, I2C https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264
(or even more cheaply a CH347T board which are dirt cheap on Aliexpress)
Both have decent Python support.
LaurensBER | 21 hours ago
Slightly more expensive but you won't have to deal with battery health and the new ones come with a 1GB NIC and USB 3 ports!
Rohansi | 21 hours ago
lexicality | 21 hours ago
htrp | 20 hours ago
lexicality | 6 hours ago
spwa4 | 21 hours ago
mschuster91 | 21 hours ago
nirav72 | 20 hours ago
LaurensBER | 18 hours ago
They currently go for ~60 USD which steep compared to the pre-ram crisis prices but nothing crazy.
For comparison sake, you can find a few really high-end routers that are faster but most are a lot less powerful than this.
The CPU/GPU actually allows you to emulate a fair amount, up to N64, PSP and Dreamcast (but definitely with some compromise) so they function great as retroboxes as well.
They sip power and run great as a small homeserver. You can even use them as a NAS for media (that you're willing to lose since you won't be running any form of RAID with 1 USB 3.0 port).
drnick1 | 19 hours ago
gpugreg | 21 hours ago
PorciiVorbesc | 21 hours ago
MadameMinty | 21 hours ago
Rooting with a completely melted screen would be a little harder, but hey, maybe rooting could be done by following the instructions step-by-step with a little faith, and then post-root the USB might work with an external portable monitor? I'm sure it's a solvable problem.
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
Palomides | 21 hours ago
athrowaway3z | 21 hours ago
There is Android TalkBack (for poor vision) which is available on first boot/factory reset that narrates the menu. Even with a completely broken screen you can get ADB set up.
wmchen | 21 hours ago
wmchen | 21 hours ago
>The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
My family (n=3) owned the Huawei P20 Pro (acquired at the same time in the same promo, perhaps the same batch?). This product line seems to have serious issues with battery swelling. Each phone had spicy pillows at some point within 2 years of ownership. Even outside the warranty period, Huawei was willing to replace the battery at their cost, at their contracted Toronto repair centre. Each of the repaired phones had their spicy pillows return within 6-9 months. Huawei was still willing to repair the phones, but at that point I'd rather have recycled it. I strongly suspect Huawei was avoiding doing a voluntary recall and triaging it through their RMA process, given how little resistance their customer support put up (they immediately sent back an RMA label without requiring any pictures).
semi-extrinsic | 20 hours ago
nijave | 21 hours ago
Sometimes there are pretty good deals on laptops, especially off lease. I've seen some $400-500 w/ 32GB RAM pop up on Slickdeals every few months.
paxy | 21 hours ago
bityard | 19 hours ago
The battery is a free built-in UPS and isn't a fire hazard unless the charging electronics were designed spectacularly poorly. The BMS knows to stop charging the battery when it's full. All of these phones probably use the same set of well-known BMS chips, I would imagine.
aucisson_masque | 17 hours ago
Secondly, using a device on a battery to run 24/24 is nonsense, you are Puting a lot of work on the battery by constantly getting it at 100% and eventually it will break and with it your data.
Thirdly, these devices have just a usb port. Sometimes usb 2.0. What you gonna do when the 128gb is filled up ?
joquarky | 15 hours ago
vkaku | 21 hours ago
I was looking to try out Joel's TrueNAS on ARM this time with a Pi 5, a PoE and NVMe Hat ... I decided against it and ended up getting a good old cheap x86 compact NAS instead.
The pricing is off.
aleph_minus_one | 21 hours ago
Reballing the RAM of the Raspberry Pi is blocked by its firmware:
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2380887#p2380...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49786689
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
EDIT: See also https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/raspberry-pi-ram-lock... linked under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50429356
kiddico | 21 hours ago
vkaku | 19 hours ago
Here's a handy post on how people are dealing with it.
https://hackaday.com/2026/09/22/raspberry-pi-ram-restriction...
aleph_minus_one | 18 hours ago
Quote from your referenced article:
"even the bootloader is cryptographically signed – no patching out the RAM check code, sorry to spoil it."
So, according to this article, you really have to downgrade the bootloader to an old version that does not yet contain the RAM check.
vkaku | 16 hours ago
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
This was shipped for a very long time because some retailers were just soldering RAM and selling these off. There's plenty other interesting things going on.
I'd take the old firmware and just update memory chips when I need to; Better to replace them and keep them running for a long time.
batrat | 21 hours ago
varispeed | 21 hours ago
Aurornis | 21 hours ago
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w/
It also has twice the RAM of the original Raspberry Pi (at launch), plus WiFi, plus a lot of CPU power, and a powerful GPU, and a lot more.
I have a 16GB model and I use that much RAM for some specific development work on the Raspberry Pi platform, but now I wish they had never announced the 16GB model. It has created so many complaints from people who shouldn't and won't be buying it.
forgotpwd16 | 19 hours ago
Let alone has it been hard to acquire for 6mo+ now, it's out of stock until mid-2027. Of course, can find sales for $115+ on ebay.
nbernard | 21 hours ago
justin66 | 20 hours ago
$35 today gets you a 1GB Pi 4 Model B. For somebody who actually needs the form factor, it's pretty much a fine value.
For somebody who wants a server, it's always been a weird choice. (sorry Jeff :D )
For somebody who wants a desktop, the Raspberry Pi 500+ was a really fun choice when I bought mine in January. They cost twice as much today, which is sad. (although if anyone is feeling the desire and lives near a store, Microcenter has them on sale for $100 off...)
paimapi | 21 hours ago
beachy | 21 hours ago
manIliketea | 20 hours ago
varispeed | 21 hours ago
georgemcbay | 21 hours ago
If my computer fails, I have plenty of old components from older systems that I can swap in. I also have quite a few old phones (my primary job over the past decade has been Android development, so I have older test devices that still function fine for my purposes). And consoles are just very optional (and way more costly than I am willing to pay) when they start costing $1500+.
Overall there are some positives from this, I'll be responsible for less e-waste. This is something I always tried to be cognizant of in the first place, but the economics will really force my hand even more.
Of course, things aren't all that great considering we got into this situation due to technology running in large datacenters running on lots of dirty power like methane turbines.
a1o | 21 hours ago
reeredfdfdf | 21 hours ago
I think Raspberry Pi is worth it only for some niche use-cases with current prices.
nijave | 21 hours ago
ESP32 handles IO and streams data somewhere else that does any processing needed on more powerful hardware.
ssernikk | 21 hours ago
hoppp | 21 hours ago
cheschire | 21 hours ago
What on earth are these SKUs even targeting? 16GB in a raspi is nuts.
lapetitejort | 21 hours ago
0: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inau...
mac3n | 21 hours ago
eichin | 21 hours ago
OhMeadhbh | 21 hours ago
Modern top-of-the-line RasPis seem more like ARM PCs with fast, efficient multi-core CPUs and GigE. I bought a RasPi 500 at the beginning of the year just to see what it was like and it's my new "email and light web browsing" daily-driver. Though yeah, I probably wouldn't have paid $410 for it.
I bought my original RasPi mostly for the I/O. I wanted to blink some lights, drive some servos. And if I wanted to do that again, I would probably buy a Pico or Zero.
oakchris1955 | 21 hours ago
Yeah, because a second-hand 13-year-old computer is gonna last quite a long time.
PorciiVorbesc | 21 hours ago
OhMeadhbh | 19 hours ago
And CPU power consumption is only part of the whole system. And a lot of the system power scales with bus speed rather than inverse CPU age. It's possible recent systems will consume more electrons than older systems.
PorciiVorbesc | 17 hours ago
Except that modern apps and modern websites can be so demanding compared to their vintage counterparts, that they'll rev an old CPU at full tilt for basic modern tasks, while for a new CPU will seem to be idling at the same tasks.
Just try watching 1080p AV1 youtube videos on a vintage CPU vs one with dedicated AV1 decoder and you'll see what I mean. Yes I know h264ify exists, but its existence only reinforces my point.
I have an core 2 quad CPU at my parents place and simply browsing the web (with adblocking enabled even) pegs it at 100% most of the time sucking >90W. Meanwhile a mid level android phone barely breaks a sweat sipping battery on the same tasks.
OhMeadhbh | 11 hours ago
PorciiVorbesc | 4 hours ago
Well that's not a large userbase on HN commenters so that point is moot.
OhMeadhbh | 22 minutes ago
OhMeadhbh | 19 hours ago
nyargh | 18 hours ago
booty | 18 hours ago
Ignoring all of that for a second, and focusing on the generalized sentiment:
Well, I'm a huge fan of that, but that seems like a fixed-purpose system. What a lot of people want from personal computers is the flexibility of doing fun and new things: new software, games, whatever.Even "browsing the web" is (highly unfortunately) not a fixed purpose, as web standards evolve and pages (highly unfortunately) get heavier and more JS-dependent.
OhMeadhbh | 11 hours ago
OhMeadhbh | 11 hours ago
OhMeadhbh | 11 hours ago
Aurornis | 21 hours ago
You want the Pi Zero 2 W, which is under $20 when it's in stock.
You also need to buy somewhere other than Amazon, which is where sellers go to unload their inventory at exorbitant prices between restocks.
OhMeadhbh | 19 hours ago
jauntywundrkind | 21 hours ago
And it runs a fantastic CachyOS (a super tuned Arch) install, called ArmadaOS, https://armadaos.dev/
2026 has been pretty amazing, with the slow work upstreaming Qualcomm support really building. A bunch of really great chipsets have mainline support and actually work. The Thor is a bit behind SM8550, but SM8650 and SM8750 handhelds are also available (just a bit pricier, and non-dual screen yet).
Alas most phones don't have unlockable boot loaders. I'm anti-interested in the sad experience of Android, being unable to read my own files off my device. I really want to be able to read my chrome profile data, for reasons. Absolutely no go.
switchbak | 21 hours ago
Call me cynical after being burned countless times on niche-ass platforms. Even my Framework 13" has a flurry of issues I've never seen on more mainstream hardware. Life is too short to worry about bizarre firmware issues in hardware that no one is paid to support.
jauntywundrkind | 19 hours ago
I for one am delighted that you can buy a modern-ish high performance, advanced processing node based system, that's small, that has such incredible capabilities, that's super power efficient. And that finally it runs a mean Linux!
Aurornis | 21 hours ago
Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at. Now that the people who need a desktop or server have re-discovered that they're better off using an actual desktop or an actual server for their purposes, we should get back to treating these like embedded systems boards.
TacticalCoder | 21 hours ago
Oh yup... I'm running unbound (DNS resolver) at home 24/7 on a Pi 3 from 2015 since years and years. Zero issue. I run that on a Pi because that one really needs to be on 24/7 and hardly consumes any resources (I mean: it's just DNS queries). But a Pi simply ain't good for much more than that.
> I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
I fully agree. For the proper stuff I encourage anyone to buy used enterprise gear with proper RAM (i.e. ECC RAM) and a proper CPU (like a Xeon).
I've got four NUCs too but the real workhorse is a used Xeon with ECC RAM.
> The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at.
I agree. I've got like seven Pi (I was an early adopter of those) but don't ever plan to buy another.
It's like you said: they lost the plot (not just the community: those who make them too).
quietsegfault | 20 hours ago
jasomill | 5 hours ago
mschuster91 | 21 hours ago
The thing is, they are all x86. The currently available ways to get an ARM general purpose computer are... Raspberry, Raspberry clones of various degrees of shittyness, Apple's lineup and a few Chromebooks plus even rarer Windows systems that no one wants because nothing runs on them.
andOlga | 20 hours ago
You might want to give Windows on Arm another spin if you haven't touched it lately, because you're either operating on very outdated information or you work in a very narrow field. Everything I tried throwing at it runs on mine. Exceptions are some drivers and kernel mode anticheat in games.
mschuster91 | 20 hours ago
[1] https://itdaily.com/blogs/workplace/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-pc...
bigyabai | 20 hours ago
cbm-vic-20 | 20 hours ago
copperx | 20 hours ago
drnick1 | 19 hours ago
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
The difference, of course, is that it did come up. If an ARM system was incompatible like that it would have just blackscreened.
fg137 | 18 hours ago
mindslight | 13 hours ago
Dylan16807 | 21 hours ago
And now you pay the old 16GB price for 4GB.
jefftk | 19 hours ago
JoshTriplett | 19 hours ago
Somewhat, but not all of that demand was real; some of it was promised and not followed through on.
Also, supply isn't growing to match, in part because some companies exited the business.
robotresearcher | 19 hours ago
This is not the same stuff an H100 uses, and it’s not even made in the same facilities, is it?
I think it’s more likely that the volume is not large enough to make up for the previously crappy margins on cheap RAM products.
It was great while it lasted.
michaelt | 18 hours ago
A workstation user or gamer might want a desktop PC loaded with DDR5. But they'll also consider a desktop with DDR4 or even a laptop with LPDDR4X if they get more for their money.
So a rise in demand/prices for DDR5 can trigger a lesser rise in demand/prices for LPDDR4X
robotresearcher | 18 hours ago
It's a surprise bonanza for the low-end RAM producers. Raise prices substantially with no new investment needed. Some of these factories must have paid for themselves years ago.
akman | 18 hours ago
tjwebbnorfolk | 17 hours ago
robotresearcher | 17 hours ago
If the wafers are the bottleneck, e.g. ASML's god-machines, then yeah, it's annoyingly the same thing.
cyberax | 16 hours ago
Yes. Due to the way the RPi board is laid out, they can only support one DRAM chip. And 16 Gb modules are the most expensive ones available, they are the ones that go onto 128Gb and 256Gb sticks.
robotresearcher | 12 hours ago
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
WesolyKubeczek | 18 hours ago
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
stock_toaster | 17 hours ago
and also because of the memory cartel.
Aurornis | 19 hours ago
The cost of 16GB Raspberry Pi is driven by the RAM. Everything else is a small addition to the BOM cost.
The 16GB was introduced when it was affordable. Now it's just becoming a mental obstacle for buyers who think they should only purchase something if they can get the top model. That's why I suggest everyone pretend it doesn't exist. Unless you really need it for something, the 4GB or 8GB can do most things.
piyh | 21 hours ago
iLoveOncall | 21 hours ago
utternerd | 20 hours ago
Aurornis | 19 hours ago
Why are so many people angry at a situation that doesn't exist?
The use cases above don't need a $385 16GB Raspberry Pi 5.
Did you notice they weren't even using a Raspberry Pi 5?
A 1GB Raspberry Pi 4, which would run those applications, is $35 and in stock: https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-1gb/
iLoveOncall | 19 hours ago
You are the one making up a situation here.
Aurornis | 19 hours ago
I'll quote it for you:
> A Pi 4 is my son's primary computer
So, no, I am not making up a situation.
Chaosvex | 17 hours ago
opan | 18 hours ago
Chaosvex | 17 hours ago
Brian_K_White | 20 hours ago
Even if using those, if it's not in a robot or a weatherproof box on a pole or something, then a usb gpio dongle on a pc or mac makes 900x more sense.
The fact that something is done does not serve as an example that something makes any sense to do.
Using a pi for a computer is like when women knit sweaters for things that don't benefit from sweaters.
Aurornis | 19 hours ago
They would be fine with the low RAM models.
This is my point above: Most people should ignore the 16GB model.
emil-lp | 21 hours ago
I need to `npm install strip`
ethersteeds | 20 hours ago
jazzyjackson | 14 hours ago
deadbabe | 20 hours ago
If you created a little cube the size of an Apple Watch with built in WiFi and Bluetooth, and maybe put a little LED screen on it, and it could run Linux and could be powered with POE and USB-C or something, people would feel an urge to just buy one, with no real use case for it.
adzm | 20 hours ago
Obscurity4340 | 20 hours ago
marky1991 | 19 hours ago
vablings | 20 hours ago
aivisol | 20 hours ago
kotaKat | 20 hours ago
IronBacon | 18 hours ago
m4rtink | 19 hours ago
It controls whatevwhatever hardware, reads some sensors, etc.
Then when needed gets oders from a normal computer over network or BLE via some simple protocol.
Rohansi | 19 hours ago
In reality, though, the use cases where you need Linux and GPIO are very slim. It's overkill, an ESP32 is realistically more than powerful enough, and Linux isn't even good for GPIO.
karlkloss | 8 hours ago
I've even found routers in the dumpster, that can still run actual OpenWRT comfortably.
jasomill | 5 hours ago
MomsAVoxell | 19 hours ago
analog31 | 16 hours ago
I've had a couple of RPI's running as home file servers for well over a decade with the only reboots being due to power failures. But today, the cost sensitive option would be a refurbished mini-PC.
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
pjmlp | 8 hours ago
joezydeco | 19 hours ago
You could respin, but you can't get that Broadcom part because Fuck You, We're Broadcom™. So now you're looking at a whole new platform if you want to proceed. It's still cheaper to pay loanshark prices for RPIs... for now.
to11mtm | 17 hours ago
IDK why anyone would build a full product around one, versus the more sensible option of maybe prototyping with one while planning a shift, whether it's the 'Version 2' or something. Anything other than dependence in a full platform when half the point of ARM was how easy it is to get your own semi-custom spin.
joezydeco | 14 hours ago
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
More practically, if you don't have tight timing requirements (which a lot of the time you do, but not always) you can get a USB adapter and plug it into some random laptop.
joezydeco | 53 minutes ago
vablings | 17 hours ago
https://www.compulab.com/products/system-on-modules/?gad_sou...
I haven't cross refence but this looks like the Linux SBC that is inside the Eightsleep
https://www.compulab.com/products/computer-on-modules/cl-som...
joezydeco | 14 hours ago
bsder | 16 hours ago
Beaglebone Blacks have and continue to exist. They were actually open and documented. They genuinely fit in their advertised power envelope. They have more and better I/O than an RPi. Had people used those, RPi would be a memory and Broadcom wouldn't be an issue.
Instead, everybody flocked to the RPi because it was subsidized and now have shocked pickachu face that things are expensive now that subsidies have been withdrawn because people want profit and/or can't keep up with RAM prices. ╮(°᎑°)╭
Broadcom is a known adversarial player to EVERYBODY. I feel zero pity for anyone who continues to use them and get burned. ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
joezydeco | 14 hours ago
Later down the road when they still bitched about lack of documentation, or a viable bootloader that didn't need that silly GPU, or how to mount eMMC instead of SD cards that constantly fell out...they still didn't want to leave it.
I admire the project for bringing more people into embedded Linux, I just wish it was closer to the economics of how this business works.
For the record I'm a AM335x (Beagle) user and it's worked out just fine for me. Thankfully the Beagle community was a bit better than some of the other SOM vendors out there. And the Octavo SIP version is a nice thing to whip into a design when you need it. And I do like Freescale's iMX as well, that was where I got my start.
jcelerier | 10 hours ago
left-struck | 16 hours ago
pseudohadamard | 12 hours ago
necovek | 20 hours ago
Yes, I'm missing an NVMe SSD in there too, but I've got a bunch of older 512GB drives around from upgraded computers.
Power usage is probably lower on the Pi5, but likely not by much anymore in the idle state.
petre | 19 hours ago
kalaksi | 19 hours ago
So how much was it new?
IronBacon | 18 hours ago
necovek | 8 hours ago
kalaksi | 7 hours ago
necovek | 7 hours ago
I also bought that 2x48GB set for... checking Amazon order history... $280 back in 2024, and I thought I was _splurging_ for the max my mini PC could take: it's listed at $1699 today :O
kalaksi | 6 hours ago
cyberax | 16 hours ago
Yeah. SODIMMs are cheaper, a 16Gb stick will likely use 2Gb chips. RPi boards have space for only one DRAM chip.
ozim | 19 hours ago
If you don’t need GPIO just go with NUC/Minisforum.
tatjam | 17 hours ago
ozim | 16 hours ago
Arduino not so much. Maybe with AI it would be faster for me.
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
serf | 9 hours ago
kristianpaul | 19 hours ago
MomsAVoxell | 19 hours ago
That's not to say I don't have much beefier work computers - I do - but for the rPi 500 is a perfectly cromulent home computer. It's a computer. I just plug it in, it works.
ipdashc | 19 hours ago
*: I am so glad we're finally out of the phase where people were using Pis for hobbyist tasks where an Arduino would have worked just fine. Especially now that there are so many cheap, accessible microcontrollers. ESP32s obviously, but Raspberry's own RP2040/RP2350 have been more useful to me than the Pis themselves ever were.
QuercusMax | 17 hours ago
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
pmontra | 9 hours ago
In this way I have a TV that follows me around my house. I'm not stuck in a place to watch it. It's mostly for news and sports. Movies, YouTube etc are on phone and tablets anyway. A better smart TV mostly on my own terms.
rolosa | 18 hours ago
If you do need something like a raspberry pi I think the Arduino Uno Q is a solid choice. The 4 GB RAM variant is iirc $80 or so.
asdfman123 | 17 hours ago
Be careful, Sam Altman might be reading this!
tomaskafka | 18 hours ago
Narishma | 18 hours ago
Not only that, I bet most hobby use cases can be served fine by the older and cheaper Raspberry Pi 2, 3 or 4 models, which are still being sold.
hn_throw2025 | 17 hours ago
I use it as a mini NAS to avoid powering up my Synology too often (crazy electricity prices here). It runs Tailscale, Samba, Docker, Postgres+pgbackrest, nginx, Pihole, and some bespoke apps I developed. Just looking at htop, I could probably get away with the 4GB model, but I wanted plenty of scope for adding more custom webapps and services like HomeAssistant.
platevoltage | 18 hours ago
Nekorosu | 18 hours ago
jasomill | 59 minutes ago
I'm currently using an RME Babyface Pro, one of the nicest USB audio interfaces I've had the pleasure to use, in standalone mode with no USB connection at all as a glorified headphone amp for my phono preamp and HDMI audio via my display's S/PDIF output.
xyzsparetimexyz | 18 hours ago
I'm sick and tired of this memory austerity. Don't go blaming consumers for issues that the ai companies caused. I should be allowed to want a 32GB rpi5 for €75.
teamonkey | 17 hours ago
serf | 9 hours ago
my answer: i'd run an OS on ram, snapshot to an nvme periodically and still have enough ram for redis/sqlite/CI/build tools/ docker+network watchdogs/misc services..
.. AND STILL have enough ram to throw an 8b toy llm in there for good measure with a large context..
..at 5w.
if we get permitted to add a hailo board on top of that mythical 64gb rpi then a lot more fun opens up.
mind you my plans wouldnt change much if you said it was an intel N150 with 64gb of ram or some such, aside from the omission of the hailo hat.
If the CPU was more capable on the rpi5 i'd lean to VM host. If the GPU was more capable i'd lean to transcoding/caching system for a home media setup.
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
artemonster | 17 hours ago
rolosa | 14 hours ago
Raed667 | 17 hours ago
atoav | 17 hours ago
If I had one wish to the manufacturer it would be: PLEASE produce a 3B++ with the same periphery, but some things higher speced:
- 4K HDMI with hardware acceleration for 4K video
- faster Ethernet
- USB-C connector for charging
- Don't you dare to remove the headphone jack and the analog video out
- Don't you dare removing the full sized HDMi jack
- If the CPU can be faster without much cost increase, do it, if not keep it as is
That is it.
left-struck | 16 hours ago
I originally got it for more advanced embedded projects but eventually it was what started my journey on self hosting.
michaelt | 16 hours ago
At $385 - not so much.
TiredOfLife | 3 hours ago
port11 | 8 hours ago
For a basic home server, the Pi does ok on a trickle of watt-hours, whereas our home server hogs 12Wh just to be alive. So these dev boards still serve a purpose in many ways, but they’re all very expensive now, 16GB of RAM notwithstanding.
Anon38 | 7 hours ago
spwa4 | 21 hours ago
1) AI really does require a scaleup in compute power. In other words: you will be upgrading your hardware or use old software (at least if you want to run local or host your own saas)
2) the AI buildout means you can't buy the hardware, you can only rent it "in the cloud", because the AI buildout makes everything too expensive. Including memory, a nonnegotiable component of any computer or server
It only works, of course, if Amazon and Google and Meta and ... keep buying for another 2-3 years but that seems to be exactly what's happening.
Worst of all: monopolies used to at least require investment. But Amazon and Google aren't investing, really. They're still net profitable companies. It's almost insulting.
novaRom | 21 hours ago
spwa4 | 20 hours ago
AyanamiKaine | 20 hours ago
The fact that Hugging Face was attacked not by a small amount of compute but such a vast amount of computation. It was only possible because its already so centralized by Open AI.
It feels a bit like cyberpunk where only the big companies in reality will have the resource to pull of such an attack.
vannevar | 21 hours ago
ashton314 | 21 hours ago
I was having a ton of stability issues: my filesystem would randomly go read-only after a few minutes. After trawling through my system logs, Claude suggested that it was a memory issue. I ran MemTest86 and it bailed out after 10,000 errors.
So now I was very depressed because RAM prices are sky-high and I currently cannot justify spending ~$150---more than what I paid for when I got this box used off of Ebay mind you---to replace the RAM inside.
Then I remembered my wife had an old laptop she hasn't touched in years lying around. I popped it open and, lo and behold, the RAM was compatible! I felt very fortunate that I was able to do that. Thoughts and prayers for all the folks who need memory---I've felt the despair.
robleafwagner | 21 hours ago
0x_rs | 21 hours ago
eddieroger | 21 hours ago
colejohnson66 | 21 hours ago
JeppyG | 21 hours ago
tete | 21 hours ago
JeppyG | 19 hours ago
cowlevel | 21 hours ago
OleksandrC | 20 hours ago
ex1fm3ta | 20 hours ago
calgoo | 17 hours ago
silveira | 20 hours ago
For everything else, either go lower level with ESP32 or higher level with a mini pc.
That's where we are right now.
m4rtink | 20 hours ago
VLM | 19 hours ago
You'll be told its the price of PCBs and chips, but again, the same company can deliver a box of three Xiao brand ESP32 dev boards to my door tomorrow morning for a hair over $20 including tax and shipping and handling.
You'll be told its a temporary supply chain disruption until you remember they've been pulling that scam for some years now, and as long as people fall for it and throw money at them, they'll keep pushing it.
The problem is they sold out to the hardcover textbook manufacturer business model. Take the head of the EE dept out for dinner and box seats at last night's sportsball game, suspiciously the EE department syllabus now says you need to buy it or else, and the seller says now that its a mandatory purchase "will pay anything for an education" in response they will charge "anything" which apparently is $385. See also Boomers and "will pay anything for medical care" well they know that and wait until you see the bill LOL. Also see real estate bubbles.
I don't see why they don't raise the price to that of an Apple Neo laptop. Its the same market and business model, pay what we ask or die uneducated and unemployed under a freeway overpass. Don't you want your kids to learn STEM and be successful? Well that'll be $385. Its the new "World Book Encyclopedia" scam.
Cockbrand | 19 hours ago
tamimio | 19 hours ago
sitzkrieg | 19 hours ago
kstrauser | 18 hours ago
Once you've done that, and your max latency has dropped to 0.7% of what it use to be (yes, really, the SD card had 140x higher latency than the SSD on my system), carve out 32GB for swap and call it done. This will give you vastly better throughput on any likely use case that's not purely dependent on RAM size alone.
If I were using this as a portable desktop system, like I am with my uConsole, I'd rather have 4GB of RAM and fast storage than 16GB and the SD card. One of them is fine, just a little sluggish sometimes. The other is pretty nice, until it grinds to a halt for minutes at a time. If `apt upgrade` is your benchmark, SSD >> RAM by a wide margin.
sleepybrett | 17 hours ago
kstrauser | 16 hours ago
The NVMe in the uConsole is chefskiss.png.
sandmn | 11 hours ago
cowlevel | 10 hours ago
kstrauser | 9 hours ago
ChrisRR | 6 hours ago
2001zhaozhao | 18 hours ago
renehsz | 17 hours ago
The Pi (and the CM in particular) has become a popular base system to build products like touchscreen appliances, control panels, etc. on, because it is (or at least used to be) cheaper than traditional industrial controllers and NUCs. Also Pis can be sourced reliably and in large numbers (probably even decades into the future).
I'm not looking for the usual "buy a used laptop/phone/NUC" recommendation. That stuff makes sense for hobby projects, but it's obviously too janky to build products around.
So what would y'all use? I'm looking for something that supports Linux, is reasonably priced, and available in large volume long-term.
tarpump | 17 hours ago
Fwirt | 17 hours ago
The downside is that it won't just run all the Raspbian images that float around, which is IMO the main selling point of a RasPi: a unified hardware platform that a non-technical user can just burn an image for and go.
k0morebi | 17 hours ago
aucisson_masque | 17 hours ago
I know that ram is expensive but it doesn’t nearly explain these pricing.
For less than a raspberry price, I got a full mini pc with 16gb ram, 512gb ssd and it got a much more powerful x64 amd chipset inside.
This company should be out of business.
kbar13 | 17 hours ago
for stuff like running vms or other pure compute homelabs, folks should stop using raspberry pis, and just go the used pc route
ToyKeeper | 17 hours ago
I miss those days.
Now a slower model like the rpi5 costs more than twice as much.
nurettin | 16 hours ago
hn_submit | 16 hours ago
Yeah, this one is much more capable (almost a mini desktop PC) but it's not a hobby product anymore or targeted at education.
_imnothere | 16 hours ago
DrNosferatu | 16 hours ago
MiroslavPokorny | 15 hours ago
karlkloss | 8 hours ago
I moved away from using those small boards as servers, totally not worth the hassle. Better use a Mini or Micro ATX board, that already has everything you need onboard.
And if you want to tinker, there are so many cheap devices that contain surprisingly powerful hardware, like old routers, LTE sticks and old thin clients, to just name a few.
I found quite some interesting devices in the dumpster at work, and now with having cheap AI, it has become easier than ever to hack them.
mikae1 | 8 hours ago
The future is permacomputing!
https://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing_update_2021.html
rldjbpin | 7 hours ago
it is insane to me that the older generation stuff is getting hammered like this as well.
also if you check their website, it is interesting to read their motto:
> Whatever your application and whatever your scale, Raspberry Pi offers cost‑effective, high‑performance computing for businesses and the home.
besides the cm5 and the rp2350 listed in the homepage, looks like the org has shifted primary focus to commercial partners today. a true shame.
account42 | 3 hours ago
qubex | 2 hours ago
Now it would be a prohibitively expensive luxury. And 128 GB of my Mac Studio??
Maybe in the long run this restriction will do us well, forcing software to stop being so expansive and demanding in terms of memory.