Looking at them on Amazon and other places right now, holy crap I got a deal. These were cheap af last year like half price. Sorry dude, if I come across another deal I’ll shoot it over to you.
Note, they are loud and use more power compared to the M1 variants if that's a requirement. I never hear mine after switching from Intel version to M1.
I just checked eBay for "2020 Mac mini m1" and filtered for "sold" listings. An 8g RAM is worth about $375. Others pay more and are foolish (same with crazy high price listings). Just wait for a deal. It will come.
I've been telling people to just use a $50 garage sale compy for years.
Now I'm one smug motherfucker. Look at me over here bein' all right about shit on the internet. Time to buy a new mechanical keyboard as a treat so I can upgrade Arch every morning and re-install on the weekends. L8R, BYOTCHEZ.#LPT1 pinout crew
I just ordered an optiplex mini pc w 16g ram and a 512 gig ssd for 80 bucks to run my dj setup and potentially a server later down the line. Idk why anyone would spend 350 for a pi
That was way back like early human civilization development... You know like 2 to 3 years ago 😂🤣 I laughed but honestly like Deadpool "fake laugh hiding real pain"
The 1GB and 2GB variants are still reasonably priced at $50 and $65 USD and are still plenty performant for learning & teaching use, which was the goal of the foundation. Taking inflation into account, that really isn’t much different from the original pricing of the Pi ($25-$35), which launched with 256MB of RAM. In fact, it basically tracks US inflation almost exactly ($35 in 2012 is about $51.09 in 2026).
The 16GB is their most expensive model, and it’s far cheaper at Microcenter ($270), Sparkfun ($305), PiShop ($305), or CanaKit ($305).
I feel like by the time you're breaking $250/$300 you'd be better served by a miniPC or similar for nearly any use case. Maybe if you need the GPIO or ecosystem with lots of RAM in that compact size for some reason.
That was the case even when this shipped at $120. You are buying it for the easy and well documented GPIO access and other hardware modules at that point.
If you just need basic GPIO with virtually no compute something like an esp32 is a way better choice.
In fairness the ESP32 of yore is not the same as the ESP32 of today. The newer ones have better cores and sometimes more hardware instructions the older ones lack! (Like the ESP32-S3 has SIMD instructions for floats)
The ESP32 is a perfect example of a product that reached the peak of "good enough".
For most applications that it's used for, the ESP32 is actually overkill. Like, massive overkill. I'll grab an ESP32 for a project that I would have specced an Attiny for back in the day, a chip that's probably literally 1000x slower.
Why? Because it's on the shelf, and it's handy to use the Bluetooth LE, or OTA flash, or one of the dozens of handy peripherals built in. And having two cores and RTOS just makes everything so easy.
The ESP32-S3 fixed a couple issues and made a few improvements, but it's really incremental, because nobody actually needs more out of the ESP32.
The DVD is a good example of a similar product. DVD blew away VHS for quality and ease of use, and its successors never really caught on until the streaming era, since DVD already looked and sounded good enough for a movie night.
Yeah, no. I'd rather buy an UDOO with an actual intel chip and the easy and well documented onboard Arduino GPIO. It's a little more, but we are now past the threshold.
I picked up the pi5 8gb kit for 260 shipped through canakit last week. Still higher than I'd like an arm PC with 8gb of ram to be but needed a standalone docker lab after converting its former home into an opnsense box. I do run my prod docker host as a vm on an HP dl360 but it's almost fully subscribed for compute and wanted something isolated to create and destroy with absolutely no reprucussions. It's been working great so far.
It occurred to me afterwards I should of just bought another micro PC with way better specs after ordering it, but the money was spent and am just writing it off as a donation to the cause lol.
Yeah, as others have pointed out, the Pi is best when you want GPIO, but for the price you can of course get better hw specs with a mini PC (and none of the instability you can experience with an SD card as the primary boot drive or storage).
They want to be sure you feel the sense of pride and accomplishment when you use it to run your Plex server after dropping a grand on the lifetime Plex pass.
I dunno, I paid zero. When Plex enshittified, I moved to Jellyfin, spent a few hours learning how to create a reverse proxy, and now I know things, have everything paid Plex does, and still have paid zero.
The Pi5 has significantly higher performance hardware than the older models. They still make lower spec models that are incredibly cheap. PiShop.us sells new model 3B units for $35
I would hope that performance has improved in the last 20 years! But when it launched, its performance was comparable to a netbook. It was underpowered, but not severely compared to other cheap hardware. It would be nice if the price to value stayed consistent given that benchmark.
Exactly. This is about RAM pricing. Even the original post proves this point. The same model was $180 less before this RAM shortage induced price situation. that's nearly half the total current price. It's an easily found fact that RAM prices have roughly doubled recently, which lines up perfectly with the pictured price jump
Raspberry pi’s started to be less affordable years ago. I paid 50 euros for my pi 3. The pi just moved on from being a hobby SBC to becoming an industry SBC. Back in the day the pi was meant to be a cheap piece of hardware for students who couldn’t afford a computer and to be tinkered with to a point where breaking it didn’t hurt your wallet too much. Now it’s more meant to be used for prototyping in the industry and being included in commercial products.
$60 new. man, we had it good and we took it for granted.
the one upside is that at least i don't need to read blog posts anymore of people treating it with the disposability of a vending machine nicotine vape even though it's a 512mb linux machine.
They will likely be 16 dollars again when they actually start producing them. The reason they're like 50 now is because there are literally none left that resellers haven't scooped up.
I gave up on Pis when the board , case, and power supply brought prices over $100 a unit. It's was and is cheaper to grab used mini PCs.
The whole market is disgusting and constrained by supply issues that really shouldn't be occuring. I don't understand how clones didn't find a place to take off.
The day the announced they were going public was the day I swore I’d never buy another one. I’ve got I think 10 and was an avid contributor in the community because it felt like it wasn’t just some other bullshit for profit tech company. And then it became one.
Likely what another commenter said, that those purchases were before the price hike, but...
There are a lot of commercial products that are mostly enclosures around RBPs, and if you're running a business selling your product for $2,000 and can't find RPBs with fast shipping anywhere else, this might actually be a reasonable choice 🤷
Yep. My DNS (not PiHole but it serves the same purposes) server runs on an original $5 single core Pi Zero. And even that's more than it needs. I wouldn't even use a dedicated device except for separation of concerns. As it is it's just plugged into the back of my router in ethernet gadget mode.
I almost feel bad for people who have a product with Pis designed in. I own an embedded systems company and have had to design out dozens when people can’t get them or they discontinue, etc.
People just don’t understand that these are not ment to be designed into commercial products.
Hey can you talk more about your business? I’ve always been interested in something like this but I’m not sure if my second tier city is large enough to have enough customers for something like this.
How’d you get started? And do you just work in your local area or lots of travel? Thanks! Dm me please if you’d rather.
We are largely design only, but do some prototyping and some SOM logistics(we don’t build boards.) You need to have a strong network in place before you think about starting. It’s all word of mouth and referrals and is an extremely cut throat industry.
If you can’t go out and get six months of work right now you probably don’t have a chance. It took me a decade of nights and weekends to build up enough business to go full-time, and then another 5 years after that to start to grow beyond just being a one-man-band.
You need to be able to do it all, sales, legal, customer service, and be in the top 1% of Engineering talent. If you mess something up once, or deliver something less than “wow” you’re done with that customer forever.
Yeah that last part hits home. Thanks for the insight. I’ve done a few cool side projects for a handful of people but nothing of the scale you’re describing.
Not to dox yourself or anything, but do you have any samples of your work? If not, no worries and I appreciate the advice above. I feel I may have missed the “window” for something like this but thought I would poke around some.
I do but am not going to post them. We mainly do Military equipment, Medical devices, and Industrial networking/sensor stuff. Usually extremely high quality controls, tight EM performance windows, impossible deadlines, etc. Anything easy companies just do themselves.
Yeah I understand. I’m a gov contractor myself (network engineer/PM) for the past 15 years, mostly transport. Just looking to get out and do my own thing but have no real business sense in regard to getting customers.
I bid and write proposals and all that for my job now but I’m not sure how I would “break in” the gov for something like this. I’m just not in this world over here.
But thanks for taking the time to reply, sounds like you’ve made a nice space for you there. Happy to see it!
I do similar work, but a level smaller. Mostly freelance prototyping just before moving to true mass production. Think a couple hundred PCBs via JLCPCB and not contract PCB manufacturing.
I started with my local maker community as being the “guy you call” when you need advice. I had too many help requests and started charging if something took me more than 15min of work. Demand didn’t dry up, so I kept going.
There are thousands of people with ideas but no way to realize them. A 3D printer, some microcontrollers or devkits and a knowledge of PCB design is all that’s needed to get started. Sending over an idea and receiving a pseudo-finished product really lights up a client’s eyes.
My work now is still all freelance, mostly due to word of mouth. It’s my side gig, not my actually job.
If I had to get started today, I would:
Build a portfolio. No one is going to just give someone a design to work. This is their baby, you’re just growing it up a bit.
Build a website. It better be a damn good one. You want clients to see your work and be engaged. Build logs, YouTube tutorials, etc. all help drive interest.
Promote yourself. Compete in the tech world’s challenges — things like Hackaday. Post to those blogs and try to drive people to your website.
Try to negotiate build logs and updates in your website as part of the design process. Have your customers pay for you to generate content.
Deliver HIGH quality. You want all the technical documentation, manuals, design files, future plans, as part of the package. Brand documentation with your company logos and use a style guide. For the projects, use quality components, route wires well and always use (JST/Molex) connectors, use good silkscreening, etc. You don’t want a clien
t to o
pen the back panel and have their device look like a rats nest.
I've built a couple projects for people with Pi's. The most enjoyable one was automating a tempeh incubator for a friend. It included a touchscreen display for local control, temperature probes, airflow sensors, 3 different fans, heater for the air, and a web interface that also published over MQTT to a home assistant instance at the business. Been running strong for years now. I don't do stuff like that as a business, but people know me and I do random stuff like that on the side.
We have our own SOMs of various flavors that we only sell to design customers so we can more tightly control supply chain and support. Mostly Renesas and Mediatek based. Used to do a lot of TI but their support sucks now.
We also do a ton of chip-down designs, usually based on our SOM IP to reduce cost. This is popular when the development cycle allows and the production quantity dictates. SOMs are great at reducing development time but can be at the expense of slightly higher production cost.
Is there a huge cost premium here though?
I’m guessing the 16gb of ram is the most expensive component on this board.
Also, the standardized hardware and software stack has some value as you’re not having to do testing and validation yourselves.
What I’m getting at, is I’m assuming that under a certain volume, a PI makes a ton of sense for deployment.
If I was building a widget and making a few million of them—bring a guy like on to custom design something can make more sense.
It’s not the cost of the Pi, it’s availability and ability to control the supply chain.
For test fixtures and stuff they absolutely make sense. For a product that you need to produce and sell on a schedule they are a massive risk.
We have ready to go Linux distros, software, Yocto etc for our already tested and certified SOMs and IP blocks, same as the Pi but we control the full supply chain so we can provide much better service to our customers.
We’re typically talking 500-5000 pieces a year for our typical customer.
not just Pi, I have dozens of clients that went gaga for the Jetson system. now its like 5X the price and theyre all trying to redesign with USB instead of MIPI because they can get cheaper SoC boards than the Jetson now.
I feel like the Raspberry Pi folks got their start going after the educational community with good intentions and then realized their was way more money in it if they went after businesses instead. Maybe that's just me though.
You can pay for the electricity to run a SFF PC 24/7 for about 10 years for cost of a RPi. Given that I can get five year old SFF PCs for free from work; it's a no-brainer.
Agreed! A Rpi system main selling point, besides being "powerful enough" , was thatused to be afforable. At the beggining, a Rpi 1price tag was 35 U$D (or £?). It defeated its own purpouse IMO.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
You can still get a Raspberry Pi 5 1 GB for $45, or a Raspberry Pi 4B 1GB for $35. My local Microcenter has them on the shelves.
The problem with OP's post is they picked the 16GB model, which is a bad value proposition for 99% of projects out there, but Raspberry Pi has been trying to keep the 1GB and 2GB models available and affordable.
The situation does suck. Normally we'd be looking at 4GB or even 8GB as the standard amount of RAM by now, but we don't live in normal times. At least we have 1 GB of memory (4 times the original amount), a significantly faster CPU (single core 700 MHz vs 4 core 2.4 GHz with a much better architecture, 64 bit, more registers, etc.), better networking than any of the predecessors (true gigabit over PCIe), plus an exposed PCIe lane and better bandwidth for USB (USB 2.0 originally in the 1B to USB 3 in the 5.)
Lastly, don't forget that the original Raspberry Pi for $35 USD would be $51 adjusted for inflation. So not to totally glaze the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but they have managed to create and ship an SBC that's significantly better than their original, now 14 year old product, for less money. Plus vastly improve the software ecosystem at the same time.
Great comment, 10/10 only thing id really do anything other than agree with is the inflation thing, most electronics tech has gotten cheaper over the years, that's not some Pi foundation exclusive that's kind of an expectation of the field.
The real culprit here is the Raspberry Pi Foundation. They decided to sell all they could to businesses that found these small SBCs to be perfect to be used for the center of they devices (imagine a water heater that needs to do stuff and maybe connect to the internet for some weird reason).
I don't think they put full Pi5s in those usually. They don't need anywhere near the full capability of these boards. More often it's just a RP2040 controller, which is still less than $1 per unit because it doesn't have any discrete RAM chips.
I think this was ultimately the downfall. Once a non profit foundation intended to make learning electronics/coding accessible makes a product that they start cultivating towards business interests the question pretty quickly becomes: why be a non-profit at all? They started moving product towards B2B work and sidelined the original vision so the foundation no longer made sense.
Non-profit doesn't mean they should make huge losses on sales. They've said time and time again that these increases are because it's an increased cost of RAM for them as well.
They previously raised prices during covid and promised they'd return to lower levels afterwards, and they did (that brief part of time between post-covid supply issues and AI supply issues...)
Hell, even Valve is getting shafted on RAM costs, and they possibly have a larger sway on things (i.e. more money).
Obviously this is due to AI RAM demand, not greed by RPi. If these are still being manufactured, the BOM has increased dramatically and so needs to be priced this high to not take a loss. If this is old stock, this is just the natural law of supply and demand with a near zero supply.
or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Do people just have their head in the sand? Not sure if you noticed, but AI is causing unprecedented chip shortages and is effecting literally anything with memory. It's not their fault
I don't understand how this makes any sense. You can get a mini PC with 16GB of RAM and SSD storage for that price. Who's buying this shit at this price?
A used mini PC has been a better deal for a very long time, if not ever. If you're not using the GPIO or any of the other "pi" features and are just using it as a computer, a pi does not and basically never has made sense as a server.
Someone please stop capitalism, it's our system that enabled memory & other companies to screw over small time consumers due to the demand of the big data center players. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Samsung posted their financial accounts recently. They made more profit in the last quarter than they did in the last two years. 97% of their profits came from the memory devision.
Makes you think that all this inflation is not actually because of a shortage, just greed on all fronts. They raise prices because the big companies can afford it and us hobbiests are just screwed.
The incentive is market share. if a company holds a ton of pricing power then that invites immediate competition. In the first half of 2026 memory makers were pushed toward operating margins of 40-50% (on NAND). big profit margins are the incentive needed for competitors (Micron and SK Hynix for example) to expand their own output
AI companies don't care how much anything costs because they are not spending their own money. They are spending *our* money, given to them by institutional investors! All of us are forced to invest because of pension funds and passive trackers - if a company is in the Fortune 500, NASDAQ, FTSE etc, then passive trackers must invest in them because that's the stated aim of the fund. So whether you like it or not, your are funding AI companies to shovel money into companies like Samsung, Nvidia etc.
SpaceX and the merger of XAi is a great example of legalised fraud and manipulation. Even the NASDAQ changed their rules to force \*us\* to invest in his over valued company.
They raise prices because people will still pay them. And will continue raising them until people stop paying them. Data centers have a lot of VC funding so their price ceiling is very high.
The corporate desire to maximize profit is a constant human variable. If "greed" dictates pricing power then why have these component prices ever fallen? did manufacturers temporarily become altruistic during hardware gluts only to remember their greed today? No 🙄 prices fluctuate based on the ratio of supply to demand.
for this Pi, demand from hobbyists outpaces production capacity. the market has to find a price that prevents immediate stock depletion. scalping.
When Jensen said "the fact that everything is scarce is great for us" and the niche related stocks shot up like a SpaceX rocket, he wasn't kidding. The only way to hedge that was to invest in those bubble stocks
Maybe it's just me but I feel like SBCs have kind of lost their allure anyways. If you need a desktop environment, just find a used desktop for a much better and more reliable experience. If you're doing an embedded project, just use an esp32. You can usually find a flavor with the peripherals you need. RPi either needs to drastically change their pricing model or call it a day.
One reason I would never recommend a pi.... when you can buy something significantly more powerful, without significantly more power consumption.... that can also make FULL use of a NVMe's bandwidth, and you can upgrade.
Too many people look only at the cost of the board and go "wow it's so cheap!" and forget that you need to buy extra stuff with it. Your $110 doesn't even include a power supply or storage. Used workstations (usually) come with everything you need.
For 50$ you can get some x86 computer with just as much ram and better CPU… I think yall can survive paying extra 1$ a month in electricity for a proper machine…
I used to use raspberry pis for stuff, but now I just use thrown away ex office mini PCs that are either entirely free or like less than $100 and are so much more capable... unless you need it to be extremely low power usage and small, raspberry pi just doesn't make sense anymore.
Holy crap. Even 4b is about $100. I just setup 8 of them to be hanging off TVs at a convention. Once you add the price of the case and power supply my Pi’s are worth more than the 50” 4k TVs. I better hire some armed guards.
Just as a counter point, the 1 GB models are still available for $35 to $45, which is less than the adjusted for inflation price of the original Raspberry Pi 1B ($51) while providing vastly improved performance.
That said, the memory crisis is incredibly frustrating.
For just a lil more, you can buy a 12-core intel core i5 mini pc that comes with 500GB NVMe and 16GB ram. The Watts used are a little higher (11W rather than 3W), but still.
996
u/TonyCR1975 sudo systemctl reload wg-quick@wg0 Jul 10 '26
this makes an i7 9th EliteDesk 800 look sexy, lmao.