[easygenes]

You can still get the 32GB variant direct from Radxa off AliExpress for about $412 USD. Much more than launch costs (probably due to cost of ram), but that's actually still cheaper than the Milk-V Titan. The Titan ships with empty RAM slots, and you'd wind up paying another ~$200 to get 2x16GB of DDR4, which is slower than the soldered on LPDDR5 on the Orion.

If you don't need the full PCIe slot, there's also smaller SBC boards (either exactly micro-ITX or similar footprint) using the same SoC: The OrangePi 6 Plus and Radxa O6N. The OPi is available readily for $260 with 32GB LPDDR5, though admittedly the RAM is lower spec than what ships on the Orion O6.

These are my favorite sub $500 SBCs available today. Great Linux support and you need to move up to something like the LattePanda Sigma at over $600 to get something outclassing them in a similar form-factor, but then there's no option for directly slotting a full-size GPU either.

[fc417fc802]

Did you not bother to check or are prices being segregated by market?

I'm in the US and when I visit the Radxa AliExpress listing (both yesterday and just now) the 32 GB variant is priced at $644 (includes import fees) plus $24 shipping. The 16 GB variant is $547 and the 8 GB is $479.

The OPi6+ 32 GB is $300 from Amazon locally or $415 plus shipping from AliExpress. (The irony of referring to Amazon as local is not lost on me.)

O6N is over $400 without any installed RAM from what I could find (making it $600 minimum given current RAM prices).

Also reading HN comments it seems the general software support picture is not great for any of these. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401499

[easygenes]

That sounds like steep tariffs on top of the price.

I wouldn’t rely on any user reporting for the software situation as Sky1-Linux is very new and solves basically all the software problems.

The 06N doesn’t have slots, only soldered ram, so it must have RAM, only a question of how much.