[0:00]It's no joke, even though Raspberry Pi posted this on April 1st, there's a new 3 GB Raspberry Pi 4 that costs $83.75.
[0:10]And uh they've also increased the price of other pies, like this 16 gigabyte Pi 5 is now $299.99.
[0:18]That is an increase of 150% over its already pretty high price when it was launched. And the problem is that all the RAM, all the DRAM that goes into these things has been skyrocketing in price.
[0:30]Eben Upton in his blog post said there's been a seven-fold increase in DRAM pricing, and everybody is wanting this LPDDR4 DRAM.
[0:40]And uh you know, whatever the problems are that are causing this shortage, whether it's AI uh obligations that aren't actually materializing, uh people lying about the amount of uh DRAM that they need in reserve from boundaries, whether it's uh collusion or whatever, uh from the the DRAM companies that supply these things.
[0:59]I don't know. The one thing that I do know is that all these things kind of are conspiring together to I think kind of kill off a lot of things that people used to love to do, like buying SBCs and doing fun projects with them.
[1:11]If the company that you buy your SBC from is uh not already affected, they will be, and I guarantee they are already, but some people have passed on the price increases already.
[1:21]Other ones have yet to and have some old stock that they're still trying to move out. Uh but in talking with other companies that make SBCs besides Raspberry Pi, there have been SBC projects that have been completely cancelled because they can't get memory.
[1:36]Like this 16 gig Pi 5, there's not many people that are going to pay 300 bucks for one of these.
[1:41]I only have one, and that's because it was already a dubious value at 120 bucks when I bought it.
[1:48]At 300 bucks, there's no reason to buy this unless you have like a product that has to have just this, and you're selling it for a profit, and even your profit would get cut into quite deeply by having a a price go up 150% of a component in it.
[2:03]But it's just crazy. I I put together a few charts here.
[2:07]So this first chart is showing showing the price increase since launch of the Pi 5 2 gig and 4 gig and 16 gig.
[2:12]And now they have a 1 gig and of course that 3 gigabyte, and you're you're wondering like, why 3 gigabytes, that's a weird memory amount.
[2:18]Well, they're using two 1.5 gig chips.
[2:26]That saves costs because the 1.5 gig chips can be had in greater supply than the 1 gig, 2 gig, 4 gig, those kind of things, uh for various reasons, but that's why Raspberry Pi is doing it.
[2:32]They actually redesigned the PCB of the Pi 4 to allow for two chips instead of one, which is crazy, like they haven't done that on any Pi yet, and now they're doing it on the Pi 4 because of this unprecedented rise in prices.
[2:44]Anyway, that's uh kind of depressing on its own, but then if you look at SBCs overall, uh right now there are some, like uh there are some that are a very good value if you can pick them up.
[2:57]The Radxa Dragon Q6A, which I haven't done a full video on, I've done a full set of testing on it and I I like the thing.
[3:02]And I want to recommend it, but I just haven't had time to make a full video on it.
[3:09]Uh that is probably the best value SBC you can get right now, and uses a Qualcomm chip on it.
[3:14]Uh the Rock 5C is also a good value, but I've seen it going out of stock a lot. Um, other than that, I've I've tested the Orange Pi 5 and Pi 5 Pro, those are both very good boards.
[3:22]Uh but those are going up in price even more than the Pi. So it's like those were great values, but now it's 2026, and that's just not a thing.
[3:30]If I look at the 8 gig RAM models, again, the Q6A right now, if you can get it, that is the best value SBC you can get right now.
[3:38]It's again, it's a Qualcomm chip, so things, there's some caveats there, but uh Radxa currently has enough stock, I guess, of their memory that they're able to put these things out at prices that aren't sky-high, but they're going up and they're going to continue rising.
[3:51]The other thing in all of these uh slides that you'll notice is that the Mini PCs, which used to be a great value, are now just a good value.
[4:00]They're still a better value, like if you buy one of these Mini PCs that comes with an SSD, it comes with a case, all that kind of stuff, you don't have to buy anything extra.
[4:08]Uh but it used to be like a scorchingly good value compared to most SBCs, but now they're just on par basically.
[4:16]But again, like the 16 gig Pi 5, that is just I don't I don't know who will buy one of these things.
[4:25]It's it's a crazy amount of of money to pay for an SBC with the performance that it has and the features that it has.
[4:29]And, you know, there's been backlash against Raspberry Pi for this stuff and it's like, yeah, they are a public company now, so they're trying to turn a profit and um I I think the biggest takeaway from this is for the hobbyist, for people who are doing these things for fun or open source or little hardware projects.
[4:44]Move to the Pi 3, move to the the 02W, those are the two models that are still a great value, and apparently Raspberry Pi has tons of supply of LPDDR2 RAM, the older slower RAM that's used in those boards.
[4:59]So the prices on those probably won't go up so much. Um the other thing I've noticed is like for myself included, I've been starting to do more projects with microcontrollers, which you can still get without paying a bazillion dollars.
[5:10]And uh it's kind of fun and and interesting to get into something entirely new there, and uh some of them are powerful enough to do things that are that I would formally do on uh SBC.
[5:20]So timing projects and uh certain control projects where I used to need a full Linux install, now you can do it in MicroPython almost just as easy or uh building smart home things with ESP Home.
[5:31]It's great and uh the the sad thing is that there is still a lot of great things that you can do when you have full Linux running on an SBC, with, you know, low-end desktop class performance, that we're just not going to be able to do.
[5:46]And uh, you know, even if we're talking about buying used hardware, that the prices on that stuff is going up, especially if it has a lot of RAM.
[5:54]So certain hobbies are just kind of impacted and and dying off right now and I don't see a rosy future for it, unless we can find a way to uh get these prices back down at some point, because my my income from YouTube hasn't gone up.
[6:09]In fact, it's gone down a little bit the past year and a half because YouTube's viewership for long form videos like these has gone down, and uh yeah, it's it's not not a great situation that we're in for this.
[6:21]But uh maybe maybe I'll just become a retro YouTuber and do all my fun Mac projects uh until we get back to having reasonable pricing for these things.
[6:30]Anyway, uh until next time, I'm Jeff Girling.
