1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

[linguae]

It’s sad to see the one area of life that has long resisted inflation (computing) now succumb to inflationary forces. Other than emergency situations such as COVID-19, I’m used to seeing prices going down over time for computers and their components. It’s one of the rare bright spots when everything else is escalating in price, and now that’s disappearing.

[dagmx]

Firstly, this is not due to inflation. The price increase is explicitly (per the article even) due to increased market demand that is causing raised prices.

Secondly, Computing has always been subject to inflation. It cannot escape inflation. You may not notice it , perhaps due to the increase in performance but the cost of parts definitely has risen in the same tiers if you look over a long enough period to avoid pricing amortization

[coldtea]

I've seen prices for memory, SSDs, thunderbolt hubs, and thunderbolt/high end USB cables, flatline or get worse over the last 3 or so years.

[Damogran6]

In general, your dollar buys a _Crazy_ amount of compute...but over the last 30 years or so, RAM has spiked several times (Taiwan plant fire) and suffered from several market driven spikes (DDRx shortages, Apple's crazy pricing structure)

[Glemkloksdjf]

There was the issue of hard disk prices for years after the floods in taiwan in 2011.

GPU prices were horrendes when crypto happened (they migrated into a stable issue but it was still because of crypto).

DDR4 jumped because they started focusing on DDR5 before these news right now.

I could probably find more examples but hey

[nullsmack]

I know one area of computing that has dramatically risen in price in the past 10-15 years or so is GPUs. Cards that fit into midrange today sell for prices that would've been considered ultra-highend just a few gpu generations ago. Today's highend prices for just a graphics card are higher than I've paid for entire computers in the past. It's ridiculous.

[wqaatwt]

> time for computers and their components

Seems it has been the opposite for some components like GPUs though for years (well before the AI boom)

[MrBuddyCasino]

Memory price fluctuations due to market demand and monetary inflation - the increase in quantity of fiat money, diluting its value - are two separate and unrelated things.

[ifwinterco]

It was always subject to inflationary forces due to money printing like everything else, it was just the one place where natural deflation due to improving technology was temporarily enough to offset it

[PunchyHamster]

It's not inflation tho ? It's just rise in demand.

[zbendefy]

What has changed now in the memory landscape/ai workload in the recent months compared to summer or spring?

[jsheard]

Apparently OpenAI locked down 40% of the global DRAM supply for their Stargate project, which then caused everyone else to start panic-buying, and now we're here: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

[ThrowawayTestr]

DRAM prices have skyrocketed recently

[aynyc]

I don't really blame them, but my question is, if ram price goes down, will RPI drop its prices? My experience with other companies is no.

[Workaccount2]

Price is an optimization problem, if you raise prices and profits increase, your product was likley too cheap. If you raise prices and profits decrease ("lol I'm not paying $XYZ for an rpi when the clone is $ABC") you are charging too much.

There are myriad other factors that go into this, especially just general inflation, which will likely fill the price gap by the time memory costs go down anyway.

[GlacierFox]

These scenarios end up being testers to see what people will pay. If people are buying your product at a ridiculous price, why drop it?

[AlexandrB]

They will if they have competitors who undercut them. Otherwise, no.

[LIV2]

Of course not

[hxorr]

On the bright side, hopefully rising memory prices will give Microsoft and its ilk the kick up the pants they need to reduce memory usage in Windows et al

[MarkusWandel]

Nothing wrong with this. Some applications really are compute bound and don't need much RAM, such as a homemade surveillance camera system I have, presently running on a couple of Raspi 4s. Suppose I wanted to upgrade to Raspi 5, why spend extra money on RAM that's not needed? These things run headless with the only GUI exposed via web server.

[MisterTea]

What surprises me the most is the 1GB option is even viable though I can imagine this will be for IoT users who shove Pi's into things doing embedded stuff where a kernel with a few user space things along with maybe a container are doing all the work.

[pjerem]

Probably but I fail to see what use case doesn't need more than 1Gb but can't be done already with a Pi 3b or 4.

[overfeed]

> What surprises me the most is the 1GB option is even viable...

There are plenty of non-IoT use cases that are viable with 1GB of general-purpose compute. Hell, I rented an obscenely cheap 512MB VPS until recently, and only abandoned it because its ancient kernel version was a security risk.

Most of my RPi tasks are not memory-bound

[shrx]

Well to be honest, I'm doing just fine with my 1 GB Pi3B home server. Sure, another gigabyte wouldn't hurt, but I'm able to run influxd, zigbee2mqtt, telegraf, grafana, homeassistant (containerized), mpd and navidrome on it without issues.

[segmondy]

you would be surprised to find out some of us are doing fine with 512mb pi zero w.

[martythemaniak]

Those price increases seem pretty reasonable given the shitty situation. I bought a Jetson 8GB a few weeks ago for $350 CAD from Amazon, I just checked that same listing and it's now $430.

[Tepix]

The article mentions "the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero". I feel this is rewriting history. The Raspberry Pi Zero was $5 when it was released back in 2015. It was mostly out of stock, but I did manage to get one unit at that price eventually.

Nowadays you can no longer get the Raspberrry Pi Zero for less than 12€ or so. I consider the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to be among the best values on the market and there hasn't been anything else that came close.

[ta9000]

$5 in 2015 is worth $7 in 2025 dollars. Combine that with higher memory prices and overall increases in supply chain costs/tariffs, and I really don’t see $10 as being that bad.

[re-thc]

The clear winners of AI are memory makers.

[orphea]

And Nvidia.

[darqis]

Starting to hate OpenAI. Them and their Trillion Dollar deals with data centers and gpu manufacturers

[sentrysapper]

Starting to? Brother where hast thou been?

[pogue]

RPi Locator is a great service if you're looking to buy a Pi you can afford.

https://rpilocator.com/

[marethyu]

$45 USD is equivalent to about 63 CAD. This is crazy considering that I brought 4GB one last year for $70 CAD.

[Audiophilip]

What do you think, when will the ram prices come back down again? Years, months?

[stuaxo]

I guess ram compression is going to be back in fashion for a while.