this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
282 points (95.2% liked)
Technology
84164 readers
4182 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The price didn't go down, he's factoring in current ram prices. $250 for an rpi 5 is wild.
Probably because $250 is wildy misleading. This is an all inclusive kit which includes case, heat sinks, fan, micro-hdmi cables, power supply and you have to go for the 16gb rpi 5 to reach $230. All the things I want to do with a Pi I would really only need 4gb of RAM max, which the kit is $140.
The 16gb rpi 5 on its own with no extras is $145 and the 4gb on its own with no extras is $70.
Sure that's still a lot more than the original goal of $35 computing but you can still get a basic kit for the rpi Zero 2 W for $40. They also still sell rpi 3, 3A+, 3B+, and 4 kits for reasonable prices. I don't necessarily need the full power of an rpi 5 either.
EDIT: Dug up some historical info. Raspberry Pi 4 released in 2019 and was $75 for the 8gb model board on it's own. Right now just a board for a Pi 4 model B 8gb is $85. The 16gb Raspberry Pi 5 originally released at $120 and is now $145. I think people are really overblowing these price increases.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/01/raspberry_pi_5_1gb/
Considering the massive leap in RAM prices, these don't seem like obscene increases to me. People are getting their fucking panties in a twist because they want the model with more RAM and seem to have forgotten that the Pi 3 maxed out at 4gb of RAM and the Pi 4 maxed out at 8gb of RAM. The Pi 5 is the first model to sport 16gb and it was $120 on release and has risen $25 due to RAM price increases, which is far less than consumer price for RAM has spiked. If anything the RPi company is doing a damn fine job of keeping prices down despite the RAM shortage. Considering that an 8gb stick of DDR4 is $60 and a 16gb stick of DDR4 is $125 yet you're pissing your pants over a $10 increase in 8gb models and a $25 increase in the 16gb models which is fucking stupid.
Anyway, fucking cry more, god damned babies. It's not like the Raspberry Pi company is the group at fault for the fucking high prices of RAM, get over it!
Funny enough I recently bought an N100 Mini-PC with 8GB (as a Christmas present to replace somebody's aged Windows 8 PC) for just a bit over $140 (more precisely €123, so $143 at today's exchange rate).
According to this the performance of the microprocessor on the Pi5 is at the same level as that of the N100.
So basically if you buy a Mini PC with an N100 and 8GB memory you can roughly get the performance of the Pi5 at the price of a Pi4 with only 4GB.
I think the point of the previous poster that "this is wild" is exactly right.
Unless you actually need the actual pins with I/O ports, I2C, SPI or such for controlling some electronics, you're better of with the Mini PC and even if you do, you're probably better of with a Banana Pi or an Orange Pi.