BananaPI board I used to use for some projects has gone from about 120-150 to almost 400. It’s not just raspberry with this issue.
16GB pie is like buying disposable silk toilet paper.
This RPi has more ram than my gaming pc lol
16GB on a pi doesn’t even make sense. It’s super inefficient. That ramm would be much better off in a datacenter \s
Think of poor Sam Altman before you buy a 16GB Pi!
Counterpoint:
Why are you so negative towards somebody who is not at all an ultra-greedy lying slimy sleazy sociopath and super-entitled cunt???
This is reminding me of hikes in property prices. Soon, older people are gonna say shit like
- I paid that much for 32 megabytes 25 years ago
- Why do you need so much RAM? Just use fewer programs
- If you didn’t spend so much money on Steam and Netflix you’d be able to afford it
They currently are. Just take a look into gaming forums discussing graphic carts and RAM prices and there will be so many people writing that they are happy that they have bought their stuff a few years ago. Which really is not helping
I started with computers in the cassette tape/5,25 floppy diskette era. RAM was measured in K’s, not Megas, not Gigas. A flight simulator (white pixels on green background, yeah) fit in a diskette, 360 KB.
Code was ultra efficient, as RAM was tiny.
With time, and as RAM got proportionally cheaper, code got sloppy, because, hey, we got space.
It’s true that programs today are several orders of magnitude more capable, but it is also true that code now is hideously RAM inefficient and bloated.
I’m not saying that the RAMcopalypse isn’t real, I run a Ryzen 9 with 64Gb in my desktop, bought before the bubble, but as the Microsoft backpedal to 8 Gigs for W11, and the 8 Gig Macbook show, software should be rethought.
AND RAM prices should go back to normal. That’s the win-win
You are expressing an illusion. The reason programs and operating systems use more ram is that they are doing more. If somebody stopped caring about resources it is web devs and Microsoft. Real-time and high end apps, like all games, have optimized frame time and the floppy era games is what looks sloppy in comparison. Except for sawyers insane games. Those are still somehow the cutting edge and a marvel of engineering to learn from 30 years later.
Having written both hand-coded assembler for microcontrollers and vibe-coded WebUI … things, I don’t know where my allegiance lies anymore.
It’s true that programs today are several orders of magnitude more capable, but it is also true that code now is hideously RAM inefficient and bloated.
The entire codebase of software in production, yes. But one thing that people might not realize is that some of our software algorithms themselves, at least for certain algorithm families, are also much more efficient than before.
I thought this was an interesting overview:
https://futuretech.mit.edu/publication/how-fast-do-algorithms-improve
The focus isn’t on memory usage, but the same general trend applies there: when someone discovered a new algorithm that improves on old ones, it can change the amount of memory used to accomplish a specific result.
Folks these days don’t know how to cut down on their startup programs
Also I’m gonna sell my 32GB DDR5 for 5 times the price I bought it and then tell everyone “just work for a few years and buy RAM I did it myself back in the day”
Why do you need so much RAM? Just use fewer programs
Even a broken clock…
Ummm can’t you just buy a full size all-in-one motherboard for that? I mean, if you need small size sure, but I originally bought Pi’s because they were cheap and small. Now they’re just small.
Yeah, and a modern x86 setup will be faster and likely even more efficient under load, with better software support too.
Yep, and unless you really need the pi form factor just get a small n100 mini PC at this point. They are pretty much better in every way and are x86 so there’s practically no limit to what you can run on them. I’ve seen n100 16gb mini PCs for as low as $60 on auction sites because some business will buy tons of them then sell them off for cheap when they upgrade.
Want something faster? Look into business small PCs they are about the size of the small ps2 and will have Intel i3s to i7s. I’d just recommend looking for one that is at least the 8th gen Intel if you care about power efficiency. If using eBay search for used auctions and use a bid sniper that uses the official api
Want something faster? Look into business small PCs they are about the size of the small ps2 and will have Intel i3s to i7s. I’d just recommend looking for one that is at least the 8th gen Intel if you care about power efficiency. If using eBay search for used auctions and use a bid sniper that uses the official api
Are they still available? When I looked recently, most of it was Haswell/4th gen, and/or the seller had taken nearly all the parts out, like the memory, drives, and CPU.
Yes there will still be big sell offs I recently got a 16GB n100 from someone selling a batch of around 100. You can set up eBay notifications for saved searches it is getting more competitive getting one for $60 is the absolute best case expect closer to $80+shipping.
You can also check alibaba if you can spend bit more and have some older ddr4 laying around. They have n100 mini PCs with expendable storage and ram and multiple Ethernet ports. you can normally find them if you get the versions that don’t come with any ddr4
N100 maybe not. N150 is what it going around lately. Price would be similar to rpi5 but is much more capable x86 machine.
$385 for a 16 GB Pi seems crazy.
Arduino has a 16GB DDR5 board designed to run local LLMs for $299. And it has 64GB of storage on board. Granted it’s not as flexible as a Pi, but it has DDR5 RAM, and a good bit of storage on board for cheaper.
A 16GB Raspberry pi with DDR4 for $385 is just robbery.
Cheapest 16GB DDR5 stick I could go buy from the local computer parts store here in Finland is currently 363€, or $406.
I thought you were joking but even in Turkey the cheapest one is 300 dollars. I bought 2x16 for less than 100 couple years ago. Holy shit.
The rpi does not have ddr5, the price makes no sense
Well, that’s great, if the price is entirely made up by the Raspi foundation and not actually caused by the massively increased memory fab costs, it means the competition is going to release a much cheaper version any day now and steal the entire market from them.
Yes as soon as the invisible hand finishes jerking off billionaires, it will get to reducing prices for us
The aim of those buying up all the RAM is to prevent people owning devices capable of serious computing, so we have to rent what we used to have back from them, with added censorship and surveillance. Sam Altman has been explicit about how he wants no one to own RAM except companies running data centres. The Raspberry Pi becoming unfeasibly expensive is just an example of that forced transition from owning to renting playing out. When it was introduced the Pi cost $15. We’re in a different world now.
I thought 64GB was overkill when I got it in my Framework laptop in 2024, but now I’m so glad that I did.
When it was introduced the Pi cost $15
It was a 700MHz single core board with 512mb of ram…and it was $35, not $15
And if tech had been proceeding since then as it did for the previous 30 years, you’d expect a whole lot more power for your $15 now.
An ESP32-P4 is about the same ram, better IO options, but half the CPU of the original Pi for about $20 right now. So the tech has been progressing a little bit.
The Pi Pico is a 32-bit processor for far less than $20.
A microcontroller is in a completely different category from the Pi 5
ESP32-P4
Theres a ton of ebook readers that are using the esp32 as a baseline. and meshtastic. Its a fantastic set of chips and setup.
It’s also been 14 years. “About the same ram…but half the CPU” for over half the price (original comment was wrong, it was $35, not $15) is not a flex. It’s a stunning failure.
The economic aspect of Moore’s law has been broken. Luckily we still have capabilities for a few more years of innovation in the performance scaling. For now.
The original Pi had 512MB not KB. It ran Linux and had an SD card “disk”. The ESP32 series aren’t in the same class.
It was also $35 at release, not $15
You’re roughly getting 150x the power for 10x the cost with the current price hike.
But a powerful CPU was never the point of the raspi. It was intended to be a cheap computer for your own hobby projects, iot setup and to learn about hardware, sensors and programming. The price was low so it would not ruin you if you made a mistake and fried the hardware.
This is no longer the case when it costs 3 digits.
You’re roughly getting 150x the power for 10x the cost with the current price hike.
Maybe in a vacuum, but in a world with millions or even billions of ‘legacy’ devices sitting around collecting dust that have equal or better compute power for less cost, these devices don’t really make sense.
No I completely agree, they make no sense these days. I was just saying that innovation has actually carried them forward and how much more power you actually get compared to the original raspis.
Moore’s law ran for 40 years but hit a wall around 2010 due to physics.
“Free” upgrades ended long before AI bros started buying up all the RAM and GPUs.
Been there, and even have the shirt to prove it 😃
So do I!
Just to be pedantic: mb would be millibits, or thousandths of a bit. MB is its big brother megabytes.
Fun fact: a kb is a thousand thousand times bigger than a mb!
Also when Raspberry Pi started, it was a not-for-profit. In a way, they went through the same transformation as OpenAI (which started not-for-profit too) but slightly earlier.
Exactly this ^^^. Pretty soon people will only own clients/terminals, we will rent CPU/RAM/GPU/Storage remotely: cloud computing for everyone. The most terrifying part of this is no one seems to care.
I expect us the tech literate / enthusiasts / professionals, advocating about this feel similarly to climate scientists. Screaming into the void as it all goes to shit.
To be fair I have heard this same pitch 4 different times since the 1980s and it hasn’t come to pass. We users just get around things by being clever and resourceful. Trust me when the big AI bubble either pops or deflates - they will be right back selling ram and drives for cheap. Someone will for sure make an adapter for all the extra data center ram or something.
I could see ram drives becoming more common. Longer bootup and return of the “it is now safe to power off your computer screen”, but super speed while working
Mainframes are the future!
I remember reading scifi stories from the 60’s and prior where they imagine giant UNIVAC-style computers that people connect to with dumb terminals, renting cpu time. And even in the ones focused on how awesome that future would be it sounced miserable to me.
They’re going to run into speed bumps soon enough. Capital problems are starting to appear in the AI market over the past month, that’s going to get a LOT worse. And no matter what, production in 5 years won’t look like it does today. Between competition, newer production tech, and political upheaval, it’s going to be a hell of a ride.
Yes but a pi zero 2w is $15 and is roughly equivalent to an OG B+. The problem as I see it is that computing segments like pis are jumping into the next segment up in power and in cost and nobody’s doing a very good job of marketing that or marketing the new product in the lower tier that are meant to actually replace them.
ESP32 started in the segment far below and moving up to match
And then there’s nVidia, making DLSS5 that requires serious computing power while causing ram shortage.
Not everything is a conspiracy launched by shady billionaires in smoky back rooms. This is straightforward.
The AI companies are in competition so they’re building AI DCs at a breakneck pace in hopes of being the one who crawls out the blast crater when the bubble pops. This building mania predictably sent shock waves through RAM and other tech supply chains.
As to home compute, most people happily ditched their PCs a decade ago and do everything on their phone. I’m not sure tablets are popular anymore. Keep in mind, most consumers can’t pronounce Raspberry Pi and sure don’t want or need one. Ask the “man on the street” what he thinks of the RAM shortage and you’ll get a blank stare.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-hates-local-ai-models-computers
The RAM price jumps hurts smartphone prices too. Several models have basically no upgrades from the last year’s generation (see: Pixel) because of it.
What “conspiracy”? They openly have more ram than they can install even given the best possible build out. They have also openly stated that they are buying more than they need, to intentionally price-out the competition, and that they want everyone to rent compute from them instead of owning their own.
Why would you paint this as a “conspiracy”? Are you just that ill informed, but chose to speak anyway? Or are you intentionally supporting it?
The person I replied to framed this as a conspiracy to make us all rent compute.
If you think this is a play to capture the few remaining home compute users, you vastly overestimate the market. Reminds me of people on here thinking they’re sticking it to M$ by turning to Linux. M$ don’t give a shit, 90% of their profits are corporate Windows and Office.
If it’s a play to push corporate users into 100% cloud, good luck tech bros. Corporations are already holding onto their fleets longer, and they can wait till this bubble explodes. If you’ve ever tried to sell your boss on a subscription vs. outright purchase, you’ll know what I mean.
The didn’t “frame” anything. They are using the words out of the mouths of the people buying up the ram.
And then “vastly overestimate the market”?
You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about in general.
How much did the gaming industry alone take in last year? How about Microsoft’s corporate revenue? How about something crazy like a defense contractor, Raytheon maybe?
I’ll wait.
Just phone games on iOS have basically double the revenue of the entire PC gaming market.
It’s not as big as you think.
I never said PC. Making people buy compute isn’t just about PC games. It isn’t just about all games either. I was just trying to make a point about one of the “smallest” compute markets.
>hand rubbing intensifies
A raspi with 16gb of ram WTF!? why not just get a SFF PC instead at that point? Unless you specifically need portability or pin IO, I don’t see the appeal of raspi anymore, especially at those prices (almost $400!!!)
last time i bought one was pre-pandemic, not sure exactly how much i paid, but was under $50 new, to hear they are $400 now… i guess i go back under my rock
In 23 I bought my 5 with 8GB for €93, just checked the receipt. I could buy one now for double that. Anyone remembers tech getting cheaper and faster over the years? Pepperidge farm remembers…
I bought several of them when they were 120. But yea at current rate, not really worth it. I will say it’s nice running them off of PoE. Keeps my energy bill lower.
It used to be that a PoE HAT was a huge percentage of the total price and therefore kinda not worth it, but I guess not anymore…
Hrm, I could get 2 Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB RAM, or I could get one PS5.
How many BC250s?
Can you not get IO via a USB connected device/daughter board?
The price increase itself is more than I paid for a new Pi4B a few years back. Amazing.
I found a $10 Pi4B at one of those overstock outlets. Keep an eye you there, it’s mostly junk but you can find that deals.
I got one for 180 recently, if this keeps going I’ll have to sell it and retire
I‘m glad my old Pi3 is holding on just fine running Pi-hole and some intranet stuff in my apartment.
I feel like RPI lost the plot at some point. Like the entire point of them was a small minimal headless system that runs low end programs and scripts like a dns server or home automation system. I don’t really see why something like that needs 16 gb of ram(or a nearly 400$ price point). At the new pricing, why would anyone want to go for a Pi vs just getting a low end pc which contains actual hardware meant for higher end systems.
I guess form factor? I feel like you are just artificially restricting yourself going with the higher end pi’s vs just biting the bullet and going with a normal system.
Also I feel I should mention that this was also the same company that decided to link the ram to the firmware meaning you no longer can buy a pi and then solder a new ram on it. They claimed it was to prevent counterfeit sellers putting bad ram in it but, it still puts a bad taste in my mouth. The only way to bypass it is to go back to the 2024-9-23 firmware.
Raspberry pi started as a weird educational side project of a Broadcom engineer, and that enabled them to work with a dirt cheap mass produced SoC for the first iterations. Without broadcom, there would be no raspberry pi. The problem is, it got wildly successful, and moved from side project to actual project that makes money, and education for poor kids wasn’t as much of a priority anymore.
The entire point of them was to be a cheap, open, educational computer for kids. Even the hobbyist/homelab use-case lost the plot, let alone the commercial bullshit they’re targeting these days!
honestly I would argue that is the same plot(or at least overlapping). Low end systems would be an entry level use case for sysadmin and network design. that’s how I got started, I had an RPI that I used as a DNS, file backup and a chat bot I ran, learned a lot from the experience. But I can see how it could be taken into the commercial field as well.
I’ll admit that being a cheap way for adults to learn is plot-adjacent. But at its core, Raspberry Pi was intended to be the spiritual successor of stuff like the BBC Micro, Alan Kay’s KiddieComp/Dynabook, and OLPC.
(The shared purpose and British heritage of the BBC Micro is part of why the Raspberry Pi people picked ARM instead of x86, by the way.)
