I really struggle to see where this fits in to most use cases. The appeal of the Pi back in the first iterations was being a relatively cheap linux computer with GPIO.
RPis get sold more to the businesses and startups that started with them in 2010s, rather than hobbyists now.
If you cannot negotiate a good deal with the big industrial silicon manufacturers but you want good up-to-date kernels, RPis are a perfect option.
There are SoMs or SBCs with other CPUs like NXP or MediaTek that has more or less mainline support. However, they ask more money. The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel issues that the CPU and the board manufacturer missed.
The original vision IIRC was to provide a cheap computer for students in low-income families. You could plug into your TV at home and start learning.
Then the hobby community got wind of it and proceeded to buy out all the stock on every release (myself included, I still have one of every first 3 versions sitting in my cabinet)
At this stage I think the way to realize this "cheap computer" vision is in unlocking smartphones. Either with an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone, or with an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS.
The 80s kid in me still thinks dropping someone into a linux shell with a bunch of tools and no internet access is the best learning environment. Kids these days with their fancy tiktoks and such need to summon the old ways.
The 80s kid me lived in a small town with no access to technical manuals or people who could help. The developer manuals for $80 each or a compuserve account to get access to the source code examples of the manufacturer were completely out of reach. What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
> What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
Probably nothing. That free info also comes with YouTube and TikTok and every TV show and movie and game on demand. You have to be very disciplined to focus on difficult topics in a sea of easier and more gratifying entertainment.
"an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone": https://postmarketos.org/
"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.
It's useful if you need GPIO but not $350 useful. Nowadays you can get used office mini PCs with a 10th gen Intel and 16GB RAM for like $200 and they'll come with an SSD. No idea why anyone would buy an expensive Pi.
And GPIO support for your used office equipment is often just a cheap USB adapter away too, GPIO support is not some Pi exclusive thing, even if its 40 pin layout is widely used now etc.
I really wish they made a new Zero that doesn't use ddr2 ram to ensure that it can still be made far into the future. As far as I'm aware, nobody is making ddr2 anymore
I have decided that the Pi4 1GB is the ideal for hobbyists. Faster than Pi3, takes normal USB-C charging, and can do most single server or electronics jobs. Which is why it is currently sold out.
So strange. I can probably sell my 4GB Pi 5 for about 40% more than I bought it for... 3 years ago. This isn't how computers are supposed to work, let alone Pis.
I get what's happening, but it's strange to see it happening.
Actually, could I sell it for ~10% less than someone would buy it new? Is there a market for used Pis? Maybe 30%, I don't know. That I can sell it for what I got it for at all is wild.
This isn't exactly news, that model has been at $350 for a while.
It's not like RPi suddenly introduced a 16GB model at a ridiculous price due to having forgotten about low cost stuff. The 16GB model was originally $85 iirc. Then the memory shortage hit. They could either withdraw the 16GB model (maybe screwing over some people who absolutely had to have it) or raise the price for those with urgent enough requirements. They did the latter.
Me, I'd like to see some large MCU's (let's say a little above RP2350 / ESP32 level) with a few MB of memory, but with memory protection, like old fashioned Vaxes with that much memory. That would allow running multiprocessing OS's where the processes couldn't easily clobber each other like on the current stuff. Many programs don't require GB's of ram.
My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops that I got from BYU Surplus and added some RAM (before RAM price went totally bananas) and SSDs to.
I spent less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.
I later added a large machine that I used to use as a Linux desktop, with a GPU and 64GB RAM, which I use for generating OpenStreetMap tiles.
This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
I first checked for Mac Minis and interestingly they are much closer to $650 for similar specs.
And obviously if Intel is fine for your use case, either the N100 type of mini PC or, my preference, an off-lease HP, Dell, or Lenovo USFF PC, would be like half that for a very capable machine.
> This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
That "laptop" will also absolutely smoke the Pi on performance, too:
1) Apple had long term contracts for memory which will run out. Afterwards it will be very interesting to see what they do.
2) RPi uses older memory that is much much more expensive to buy in the market as manufacturers have dedicated capacity to newer formats used by AI boxes for KV caches
These perform way better and have similar efficiency, too. Case, power supply, cooling, and storage are all included too. If you don't need GPIO then you don't need a Raspberry Pi. If you do then consider using a microcontroller (Pi Pico, ESP32, etc.) first.
I really don't know who this is targeted at. As a development board these are extremely expensive and as a mini computer you're far better off with something N100 based or similar.
The Raspberry Pi 5 uses LPDDR4X. Finding 16GB (128Gb with a small b) chips in this size is not common. That memory chip is at least $200, probably more, even at the scale that they’re buying them.
I’m glad they’re making it available for the rare cases where it’s needed, but for PR purposes it would have been better if they just discontinued the 16GB model until RAM prices came down. I’m getting tired of hearing “Raspberry Pi 5 costs $300” now from people who have no reason to buy the 16GB version.
The 1GB version works well for simple Linux shell work and embedded projects. It’s $50.
The 4GB version works well for GUI work. Let’s be real: It’s a slow device and not a desktop/laptop alternative in 2026, so 4GB goes a long way for the use cases where you want to do basic GUI work. $110 for the 4GB model (if you shop not at Adafruit)
EDIT: Adafruit prices are higher for some reason. 16GB Pi 5 is $305 on other sites.
Similar situation, one thing I like the with the Pis design is you can throw PoE hats on them and build a whole home infrastructure system where the only thing that needs battery backup for power cuts is the main ethernet switch - all of the essential services, switches and wifi APs are powered downstream by their ethernet ports over PoE.
Makes making your key network services (VPN, firewall, DNS, NTP, home assistant etc) on battery backup very easy, as just one plug to the primary switch to keep powered, and my wifi/internet stays on when the power cuts.
I could use other devices, but 5 pis with PoE hats rack mount very cleanly in a single 1U row and passively cooled with no fan noise etc.
Imagine having a business relying on the Pi boards!
It’s worth adding Pi4@1GB still costs $35 but any other memory configurations (and Pi5) go for much more now.
They won't, no one will. Too much investment for too much of a risk of the bubble popping and yet another run of the boom-bust cycle that left the world with not even a handful of RAM makers in the first place.
I wonder so much what their initial capacity was (which ought to go up marginally, and what their expected capacity curves look like.
I would not expect them to dump cheap ram. That is a false hope. The world needs volume, massively more volume, and it feels like everyone else is going to take a sizable fraction of a decade to even start responding. Maybe perhaps possibly CXMT can scale fast, but they have many multiples to grow before they are more than a drop in the bucket.
It's also unclear when if they too will want to start stacking 12 then 16 then 24 rams atop each other, to sell chips that cost what multiples of what GPUs used to.
Dram prices and Flash prices are inflated right now, but the pi were never focused on Desktop users. As a platform it no longer makes sense for many use cases. =3
I don't think I have any beef with what you're pointing out - I was only saying that I don't think the Radxa products' pricing are demonstrating anything too shocking about the Rpi products' pricing.
I personally would probably choose one of those over a Rpi (but would probably still rather buy more off-lease Elitedesk G6 Minis, which is what I use for 'lil computer' projects)
I’m surprised to see those legacy USB ports on a board where space savings is important. Do they do it for backwards compatibility with older cases and housings?
And am I correct to see that the USB-C only does power? How do you connect your pheripherals to this board?
I think legacy USB peripherals are very common. Almost all of my peripherals are legacy USB; I think I only own a single USB-C peripheral. Old stuff still works, so I don't need to buy new ones.
Interesting. I don’t own any legacy USB equipment anymore, everything is USB-C now. I started phasing out my old equipment ten years ago and everything from the past five years has had USB-C as standard. Even my shaver chargers over USB-C.
I guess that the people who use $350 boards also mainly use USB-C. Unless you want to connect old hardware to it but I don’t see that use-case.
Not being able to connect my devices to this board is a blocker for me.
Understandable but I would have preferred a couple of fully functional USB-C ports and then have people use dongles for using old hardware on this board. Similar to using a serial adapter.
This is really sad. Me and my girlfriend at the time watched all of our movies off of a Pi 1 and a USB hard drive when it came out. Those days are long gone.
I think people commentating here are missing the point. The cost of that pi is for the 16 GB of RAM. Which in fairness, is a lot of RAM for a device of that type.
You can still buy a Raspberry Pi on a budget if you don’t need that much memory. For example, the 2 GB model is $75.
Cheapest mac mini I could spec out on the apple store right now is about $750, which if you consider how much more capable its M4 processor is than the pi, is a pretty good deal tbh.
Before the personal LLM craze you could easily get $400 Mac Minis from Apple's certified refurbished store. I bought two M2 Pros for that price and turned them into Asahi Linux CI machines.
because Apple goes in and buys out entire production cycles based on anticipated demand. Most infamously they got a year worth of TSMCs last new node - no one else could have it.
Usually, that gamble pays off, sometimes it does not (cough Apple Vision), and in some cases they get so many QC rejects that they can make an entire new product line on (financially) worthless scrap, that's how the MacBook Neo came to be - a bunch of iPhone SoC's that failed binning, I think in GPU cores.
Pi even before these ram prices was getting expensive and kind of missing the point from my perspective. Definitely good to have them releasing new models.
What bothers me is that now you need cooling for some models, and obviously price is getting too high.
On the other hand... $50 for 1Gb version is excellent still. And you should be able to use it just fine.
Some folks might have missed that memory prices on the whole are up [1] 90% since Q4.
The memory used by the Pi 5 is up 700% [2]!
Raspberry Pi are working the issue by releasing new memory variants that are cheaper[2].
1. https://au.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
2. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/a-new-3gb-raspberry-pi-4-fo...
I really struggle to see where this fits in to most use cases. The appeal of the Pi back in the first iterations was being a relatively cheap linux computer with GPIO.
People have been saying this for years, yet Raspberry Pis just keep on selling with no trouble.
Raspberry Pi’s keep selling because the software ecosystem is solid.
Yeah they do keep selling, I wonder though if hobbyist sales have dropped.
RPis get sold more to the businesses and startups that started with them in 2010s, rather than hobbyists now.
If you cannot negotiate a good deal with the big industrial silicon manufacturers but you want good up-to-date kernels, RPis are a perfect option.
There are SoMs or SBCs with other CPUs like NXP or MediaTek that has more or less mainline support. However, they ask more money. The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel issues that the CPU and the board manufacturer missed.
The original vision IIRC was to provide a cheap computer for students in low-income families. You could plug into your TV at home and start learning.
Then the hobby community got wind of it and proceeded to buy out all the stock on every release (myself included, I still have one of every first 3 versions sitting in my cabinet)
At this stage I think the way to realize this "cheap computer" vision is in unlocking smartphones. Either with an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone, or with an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS.
The 80s kid in me still thinks dropping someone into a linux shell with a bunch of tools and no internet access is the best learning environment. Kids these days with their fancy tiktoks and such need to summon the old ways.
The 80s kid me lived in a small town with no access to technical manuals or people who could help. The developer manuals for $80 each or a compuserve account to get access to the source code examples of the manufacturer were completely out of reach. What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
> What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
Probably nothing. That free info also comes with YouTube and TikTok and every TV show and movie and game on demand. You have to be very disciplined to focus on difficult topics in a sea of easier and more gratifying entertainment.
I have been trying out the FX1s. It is a good replacement with some rough edges still. Better battery life than previous Pixel 6a and Fairphone 4.
Dock can not handle an Ultrawide 1440x3440 display.
Right now it is a backup phone and my music player.
https://furilabs.com/
"an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone": https://postmarketos.org/
"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.
It's useful if you need GPIO but not $350 useful. Nowadays you can get used office mini PCs with a 10th gen Intel and 16GB RAM for like $200 and they'll come with an SSD. No idea why anyone would buy an expensive Pi.
And GPIO support for your used office equipment is often just a cheap USB adapter away too, GPIO support is not some Pi exclusive thing, even if its 40 pin layout is widely used now etc.
It's not the GPIO, it's the software ecosystem for anything you would want to connect to the GPIO.
This (the 16GB version) should not fit into most use cases. You’re buying an expensive RAM chip with a Pi attached.
The cheaper 4GB or even 1GB versions ($50 for the latter) are what most people should be looking at for their projects.
My personal fave RPi, the Zero W, is still $15 from Adafruit.
I really wish they made a new Zero that doesn't use ddr2 ram to ensure that it can still be made far into the future. As far as I'm aware, nobody is making ddr2 anymore
I have decided that the Pi4 1GB is the ideal for hobbyists. Faster than Pi3, takes normal USB-C charging, and can do most single server or electronics jobs. Which is why it is currently sold out.
They're relatively common in industrial applications now because they have really good software support and great long-term availability.
So strange. I can probably sell my 4GB Pi 5 for about 40% more than I bought it for... 3 years ago. This isn't how computers are supposed to work, let alone Pis.
I get what's happening, but it's strange to see it happening.
Actually, could I sell it for ~10% less than someone would buy it new? Is there a market for used Pis? Maybe 30%, I don't know. That I can sell it for what I got it for at all is wild.
A lot of computer parts can be sold at a high profit nowadays.
I'm still surprised that cryptocurrency fucking the GPU market was just a warm-up for the real supply chain shortages.
This isn't exactly news, that model has been at $350 for a while.
It's not like RPi suddenly introduced a 16GB model at a ridiculous price due to having forgotten about low cost stuff. The 16GB model was originally $85 iirc. Then the memory shortage hit. They could either withdraw the 16GB model (maybe screwing over some people who absolutely had to have it) or raise the price for those with urgent enough requirements. They did the latter.
Me, I'd like to see some large MCU's (let's say a little above RP2350 / ESP32 level) with a few MB of memory, but with memory protection, like old fashioned Vaxes with that much memory. That would allow running multiprocessing OS's where the processes couldn't easily clobber each other like on the current stuff. Many programs don't require GB's of ram.
My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops that I got from BYU Surplus and added some RAM (before RAM price went totally bananas) and SSDs to. I spent less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.
I later added a large machine that I used to use as a Linux desktop, with a GPU and 64GB RAM, which I use for generating OpenStreetMap tiles.
This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
I first checked for Mac Minis and interestingly they are much closer to $650 for similar specs.
And obviously if Intel is fine for your use case, either the N100 type of mini PC or, my preference, an off-lease HP, Dell, or Lenovo USFF PC, would be like half that for a very capable machine.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=m1%20macbook%20air%2016...
For what it is worth, an M4 mac mini is also like 30-50x faster. Like, legitimately.
> This is hilarious considering you can easily[1] get a whole ARM laptop with 16GB for $425 all day, and that will also include a screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and storage.
That "laptop" will also absolutely smoke the Pi on performance, too:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/24356484?baseli...
we've lost the plot. this is no longer a hobbyist computer.
Search Aliexpress for ESP32-C3 Development Board for Arduino
Search arace.tech for Radxa or Milk-V boards.
At least get a -C6 if you're trying to replace a Pi with a microcontroller.
Two months ago I bought a M4 Mini w/16GB and 512GB HDD for $599. Granted they're up to $799 right now, but a Rpi is now $350 when they used to be $35?
You're correct; they've jumped the shark.
Two things to note:
1) Apple had long term contracts for memory which will run out. Afterwards it will be very interesting to see what they do.
2) RPi uses older memory that is much much more expensive to buy in the market as manufacturers have dedicated capacity to newer formats used by AI boxes for KV caches
The linked model has 16x the amount of RAM that $35 model had. You can still get a 1GB model for less than $50.
You can get an Intel N100 NUC with 16GB ram, 500GB ssd on Amazon for less though.
This is just very expensive for what it is.
These perform way better and have similar efficiency, too. Case, power supply, cooling, and storage are all included too. If you don't need GPIO then you don't need a Raspberry Pi. If you do then consider using a microcontroller (Pi Pico, ESP32, etc.) first.
If you just want a tiny desktop computer, sure. The reason to buy a Pi is for the GPIO and the well-established ecosystem.
This is because on a COGs basis it is memory with a side of compute.
I really don't know who this is targeted at. As a development board these are extremely expensive and as a mini computer you're far better off with something N100 based or similar.
What market is this trying to compete in?
Feels like they’re just surfing the name recognition wave at this point.
The Raspberry Pi 5 uses LPDDR4X. Finding 16GB (128Gb with a small b) chips in this size is not common. That memory chip is at least $200, probably more, even at the scale that they’re buying them.
I’m glad they’re making it available for the rare cases where it’s needed, but for PR purposes it would have been better if they just discontinued the 16GB model until RAM prices came down. I’m getting tired of hearing “Raspberry Pi 5 costs $300” now from people who have no reason to buy the 16GB version.
The 1GB version works well for simple Linux shell work and embedded projects. It’s $50.
The 4GB version works well for GUI work. Let’s be real: It’s a slow device and not a desktop/laptop alternative in 2026, so 4GB goes a long way for the use cases where you want to do basic GUI work. $110 for the 4GB model (if you shop not at Adafruit)
EDIT: Adafruit prices are higher for some reason. 16GB Pi 5 is $305 on other sites.
That price I'd just buy an Optiplex or something
I have 4 RPi servers in my house on 24/7 but yeah
Funny different purpose but I bought a 2017 Pixelbook put Ubuntu on it, great machine it was $80
Similar situation, one thing I like the with the Pis design is you can throw PoE hats on them and build a whole home infrastructure system where the only thing that needs battery backup for power cuts is the main ethernet switch - all of the essential services, switches and wifi APs are powered downstream by their ethernet ports over PoE.
Makes making your key network services (VPN, firewall, DNS, NTP, home assistant etc) on battery backup very easy, as just one plug to the primary switch to keep powered, and my wifi/internet stays on when the power cuts.
I could use other devices, but 5 pis with PoE hats rack mount very cleanly in a single 1U row and passively cooled with no fan noise etc.
Microcenter (another official US reseller) sells the Pi5 16GB at a much lower price[1].
1. https://www.microcenter.com/product/702590/raspberry-pi-5
$289, for everybody who doesn't want to click.
The $35 computer, for only $350!
Imagine having a business relying on the Pi boards! It’s worth adding Pi4@1GB still costs $35 but any other memory configurations (and Pi5) go for much more now.
Who would've thought the $50 pi 5 I bought on a whim would be my best performing asset in the last few years
$50 would have bought the 2GB model at launch.
The 2GB model is now $65, so don’t get too excited.
Are Raspberry Pis (UK country of origin) exempt from the 10% baseline import tariff?
Are they actually made in the UK?
I'd presume they're shipped from China like most tech goods.
Even worse, continued RAM shortages and inflation might actually mean that will have been a good price in a year's time.
Every day I go to bed praying CXMT hurries the *$!@ up and dumps an ungodly amount of cheap RAM upon global markets
They won't, no one will. Too much investment for too much of a risk of the bubble popping and yet another run of the boom-bust cycle that left the world with not even a handful of RAM makers in the first place.
I wonder so much what their initial capacity was (which ought to go up marginally, and what their expected capacity curves look like.
I would not expect them to dump cheap ram. That is a false hope. The world needs volume, massively more volume, and it feels like everyone else is going to take a sizable fraction of a decade to even start responding. Maybe perhaps possibly CXMT can scale fast, but they have many multiples to grow before they are more than a drop in the bucket.
It's also unclear when if they too will want to start stacking 12 then 16 then 24 rams atop each other, to sell chips that cost what multiples of what GPUs used to.
if anything, pricing will be around the same. Difference will be in availability.
The memory price rises are flattening. Prices are still increasing but not at the rate they previously were last year.
2 years ago I bought a Dell R630 for about this much with 128GB of RAM and 2 beefy xeons (for their gen, anyhow). Oh, how the times have changed.
Holy cow. I know I'm not supposed to be surprised given the memory shortage, but that is insane level.
Or one can also get a better specification i5 or Ryzen 4650U laptop for <$260 with SSD and LCD, then hot glue a 32bit Arduino to the lid.
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100017489%204016%20601497625%2...
Dram prices and Flash prices are inflated right now, but the pi were never focused on Desktop users. As a platform it no longer makes sense for many use cases. =3
Come on, a one gigabyte Pi is under $50. There's no plot lost, it's just expensive RAM. 2gb is $75. That's where Pi plays well.
Yet the Radxa Rock 4d[1] has 4Gb and is selling for 69 dollars.
[1]: https://arace.tech/products/radxa-rock-4d
Four of those would be $280 though, so this doesn't seem hilariously out of scale with that.
But ram prices don't scale linearly. The 4Gb variant of RPi5 is $130.
Radxa does have a 16Gb board[1] on pre-order, coming in at $329. Though the Dragon Q8B appears to be quite a bit more capable.
[1]: https://arace.tech/products/radxa-dragon-q8b
I don't think I have any beef with what you're pointing out - I was only saying that I don't think the Radxa products' pricing are demonstrating anything too shocking about the Rpi products' pricing.
I personally would probably choose one of those over a Rpi (but would probably still rather buy more off-lease Elitedesk G6 Minis, which is what I use for 'lil computer' projects)
Up ~50% about 2 months ago (4/2026)
Damn I think I have one in a drawer.
I’m surprised to see those legacy USB ports on a board where space savings is important. Do they do it for backwards compatibility with older cases and housings?
And am I correct to see that the USB-C only does power? How do you connect your pheripherals to this board?
I think legacy USB peripherals are very common. Almost all of my peripherals are legacy USB; I think I only own a single USB-C peripheral. Old stuff still works, so I don't need to buy new ones.
Interesting. I don’t own any legacy USB equipment anymore, everything is USB-C now. I started phasing out my old equipment ten years ago and everything from the past five years has had USB-C as standard. Even my shaver chargers over USB-C.
I guess that the people who use $350 boards also mainly use USB-C. Unless you want to connect old hardware to it but I don’t see that use-case.
Not being able to connect my devices to this board is a blocker for me.
Looks like all the USB-A devices purchased over the past 30 years have not been trashed and some people still use them.
Understandable but I would have preferred a couple of fully functional USB-C ports and then have people use dongles for using old hardware on this board. Similar to using a serial adapter.
This is really sad. Me and my girlfriend at the time watched all of our movies off of a Pi 1 and a USB hard drive when it came out. Those days are long gone.
You don't need the 16GB model to watch movies, you can do that on the cheapest ones.
You can still buy a 4GB HP T520 thin client for around $25 on eBay. The Radeon GPU has a HW h264 decoder.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/185826328888?_skw=hp+t520
I think people commentating here are missing the point. The cost of that pi is for the 16 GB of RAM. Which in fairness, is a lot of RAM for a device of that type.
You can still buy a Raspberry Pi on a budget if you don’t need that much memory. For example, the 2 GB model is $75.
"Don't you know there's a war on?"
I hate this timeline: How is a Pi marginally cheaper than a Mac Mini?
Where do you buy your Mac Minis?
Cheapest mac mini I could spec out on the apple store right now is about $750, which if you consider how much more capable its M4 processor is than the pi, is a pretty good deal tbh.
Before the personal LLM craze you could easily get $400 Mac Minis from Apple's certified refurbished store. I bought two M2 Pros for that price and turned them into Asahi Linux CI machines.
In Europe, but I didn't realize the 499 one is also history. Even worse :/
At a store, some stores do have stock. Otherwise apple.com
because Apple goes in and buys out entire production cycles based on anticipated demand. Most infamously they got a year worth of TSMCs last new node - no one else could have it.
Usually, that gamble pays off, sometimes it does not (cough Apple Vision), and in some cases they get so many QC rejects that they can make an entire new product line on (financially) worthless scrap, that's how the MacBook Neo came to be - a bunch of iPhone SoC's that failed binning, I think in GPU cores.
Pi even before these ram prices was getting expensive and kind of missing the point from my perspective. Definitely good to have them releasing new models.
What bothers me is that now you need cooling for some models, and obviously price is getting too high.
On the other hand... $50 for 1Gb version is excellent still. And you should be able to use it just fine.
LMAO what a joke. N100 mini PCs are a hundred dollars less and vastly more capable aside from GPIO.
An N100 with no RAM is $100 less, but throw in 16GB of ram and now they’re $150+ more…
Also you’re missing the point.