The price increase itself is more than I paid for a new Pi4B a few years back. Amazing.
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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I found a $10 Pi4B at one of those overstock outlets. Keep an eye you there, it’s mostly junk but you can find that deals.
I feel like RPI lost the plot at some point. Like the entire point of them was a small minimal headless system that runs low end programs and scripts like a dns server or home automation system. I don't really see why something like that needs 16 gb of ram(or a nearly 400$ 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!
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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.
Honest question, what are people using their 16GB RPis for? What are you running that needs that much RAM?
I got a rock-5-itx in the before times with a decadent 32GB of RAM. It's my home server, and it's currently using 19/31GB:
The headroom is nice, I guess. Sometimes I spin up whole desktop dev environments I can access remotely.
For Halloween I used an orangepi (cause of cost, but would not recommend due to support) to install an LCD eye in a skeleton that tracks people using a object detection model. Additionally it's setup with some voice commands/interactions.
Overall that means holding 3+ ML models in ram (yolo, whisper, Vad, etc.). That basically uses up all the RAM I have and before optimizations was actually causing the chip to overheat (was able to fix that, but still hits the cpu pretty hard).
I installed SteamLink on it and use it to stream my gaming PC to my living room, which is too far away for an HDMI cord. I can get 1440p @ 120fps with no issues.
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Two things I’ve found that really help having more ram for on the pi’s:
- Any kind of docker image.
- Build times if you use the pi as an agent/runner for gitlab-ce.
I guess that makes sense. Personally I don't see SBCs as very good Docker hosts or build machines. Aren't build times and such affected much more by the weak CPU? Obviously if the system starts swapping, then sure, having more RAM to avoid that helps a lot.
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The price of a 3gb pi4 is insane.
It's the end of the personal computer era. Who'd have thought it was going to be so soon. Or at all.
Be of good cheer. The AI bubble will pop and drag the economy down so hard you'll be more worried about food than your PC.
I paid $99 for one on 10/25/25
I was going to buy my husband a second one for Christmas 😑
If he already has one then maybe an alternative would be fun, like a Libre Sweet Potato or an Odroid or something? They're a little more affordable.
I have an rpi 3, I think from 10 years ago. I run retropi. Emulating up to PSP games works okay. Anything more than that it can’t do so well.
Does anyone know if retropi on an rpi5 is better when emulating “newer” consoles? I feel like I might be better off just using an old laptop. But I like the small form factor on my tv shelf. And the retropi menu / interface. (I’m guessing that should run on a Debian laptop though?)
>hand rubbing intensifies