this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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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~~ $35. We're in a different world now.
Sam lies as easily as he breathes. Nothing he says is proof of anything.
I thought 64GB was overkill when I got it in my Framework laptop in 2024, but now I'm so glad that I did.
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~~ $35 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
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.
But you can still do that. Buy the 1GB Pi 4, it costs $35-$40.
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!
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
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.
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
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/nvidia-is-claimed-to-have-created-the-gpu-crisis-through-channel-stuffing/ar-AA2fWaLc
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.