You know that the RAM crisis is real, and not a hoax or exaggeration, when you discover that Raspberry Pi just raised the price of its boards for the third time in a matter of weeks. And the increase is brutal: the Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of RAM goes up $100, and the computer inside the Raspberry Pi 500+ keyboard goes up $150. Almost all their plates go up. The fine irony of announcing it on April 1, the day of jokes in Anglo-Saxon culture, I don’t quite get.
Raspberry Pi is a non-profit foundationthey sell almost at cost price, they earn just enough to remain as a hardware manufacturer. That is why its constant price increases are a reflection of the real increase in RAM, due to artificial intelligence, which has taken everything and leaves the crumbs to others.
Raspberry 5 boards with more memory cost almost triple what they did a few months ago. The foundation has tried to minimize the impact by launching a Raspberry Pi 4 with 3 GB of RAM. It already offers versions with 1, 2, 3, 4, and 8 GB. The goal is for you to buy only the RAM you need, so that you pay as little as possible.
This is the new Raspberry Pi price increase
As Ebe Upton, the CEO of Raspberry Pi, explains in the press release, “The price of LPDDR4 DRAM memory used in the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 has increased sevenfold in the last year.” Next to nothing.
The products affected by today’s price increases are Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 variants with 4 GB or more of memory, Raspberry Pi 500 and 500+ computers within a keyboard, all Compute Module 4, Compute Module 4S and Compute Module 5 variants, the development kit for Compute Module 5 and Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2.
The increase depends on the amount of RAM the board has, since it is the only cause. For example, the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 with 4 GB of RAM go up 25 dollars, but the Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB goes up a depressing 100 dollars, and already costs 369 euros in Spain. Here you have the complete list.
This is a shot to the heart of Raspberry, because its reason for being is its affordable prices. For 369 euros you buy a Mini PC that is much more powerful, if you were going to use the Raspberry Pi 5 for programming, emulators or multimedia.
The company’s CEO, Eben Upton, has promised something I have never seen before. When RAM prices go down, their boards will go down too: «The circumstances we find ourselves in are difficult, but in the future they will ease. When that happens, we will reverse our price increases.»
They are a non-profit foundation, and they surely keep their promise. The same will not happen with the rest of the manufacturers: when a hardware product rises for an artificial reason, as is happening now, rarely returns to its original pricewhen the storm passes.