The gift that keeps on taking. Fuck you very much.

Those 16GB machines must be flying out of the door . . .

They're lambasted when they released the 16GB version. And now they're being lambasted for releasing the 1GB version.

What should they release? One with 3.14GB of RAM?

Yeah, but if they did that would be objectively really funny.

They are riding the a1 hype train as hard as anyone. Serves them right.

They are riding the a1 hype train as hard as anyone

Got an example to back up this hyperbole?

(Article - 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $120) "the threefold step up in performance between Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 opens up use cases like large language models and computational fluid dynamics, which benefit from having more storage per core" - Eben Upton, 9th Jan 2025.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/ai-kit/

Enough for now?

...of things I wish could be un-invented, knocking off the previous title holder of those automated phone lines where you can press 1 through 4 to do a variety of things that are nothing to do with what you want, or hold to be transferred to a different call centre who will disconnect you while transferring you to another department.

You have reached the psychiatric help line. For obsessive/compulsive press 1 repeatedly. For multiple personality disorder press 2, 3, 4 and 5. For paranoia just hang up. We know who you are.

See icon ---->

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1. After spending a great deal of my professional career doing assembly language programming I came to the conclusion long ago that being obsessive/compulsive is a definite plus. I'm just not sure if I was obsessive/compulsive to begin with or if assembly language drove me to it. I believe that it was the latter. Having spent the rest of my career, at least when not doing hardware design, programming in C I came to the conclusion that while not absolutely necessary, it is within a hair's breadth of being required there too.

Getting a little closer to the topic at hand, rising memory prices affect AI too and one has to wonder given the massive amounts of memory, processors, energy, and water needed if there will be enough money left over for profits. And what will happen if there is not.

"And what will happen if there is not."

A welcome glut of cheap 2md hand memory for the rest of us.

If Raspberry Pi though that 2GB for the Pi 500 could be too expensive and had to launch a 1GB version, we'll probably be going back to X terminals pretty soon. The AI bubble couldn't have worked out better for Big Tech who prefer renting over selling and cloud over local, almost as if they engineered it that way deliberately...

Pi 500 has 8 GB. The 500+ has 16GB. There is no 2GB version.

Oops, slip of the keyboard. I was thinking of the Pi 5.

The price rises for the Pi 5 are quite steep - 21% for 16GB, 19% for 8GB, 17% for 4GB, and 10% for 2GB. Memory now accounts for almost a fifth of the cost of the 16GB version.

I expect there is also pressure to increase the price of the 8GB Pi 500 and 16GB Pi 500+.

For a product which had such appeal for being low cost I don't know what its future is now Raspberry Pi are moving more towards desktop and industrial products. I don't see the 16GB offering value for money and I can't see a Pi 5 1GB having much appeal even for makers - Are there many applications requiring the speed of a Pi 5 but not memory?

The $15 Pi Zero 2W, even with only 512MB, seems to be the best option for makers. If they increased its memory it would be even more popular but would cannibalise other sales.

I think Raspberry Pi have lost their way and the steadily declining stock price reflects that.

Presumably the competition will also experience cost pressure from RAM and will increase their prices too. All comparable products will have a similar drop in value for money.

If the price of RAM has quadruped in months, do you expect RPi to absorb that cost and lose money on every purchase?

It's a shame Pi and other SBC don't have socketed memory; then you could buy what you can afford and upgrade when prices fall.

Ah, sockets I remember them well. Unfortunately the "socketed" memory due to modern IC packaging would have to be some form of memory module. Since there is no standard SBC memory module specification it would probably increase the price. Using standard laptop SO-DIMMs might help keep the prices down but they are large compared to most SBCs. I'm not sure how much the new CAMM2 laptop memory module would help with that.

When the AI bubble bursts, there will be loads of gear available at knock-down prices.

I wouldn't bet on RAM prices falling as quick as they rise.

Unless you're looking for rackable gear I wouldn't bank on it. The half dozen ML servers I have sitting in my build room waiting for the finance team to finally agree that they've depreciated to the point where we can throw them out* are most definitely not the sort of thing you'd want in your home office, and the new ones are even more specialised.

The GPUs rely on case airflow for cooling, the mainboards have so much random shit in their bioses that they take an age of middle earth to boot, and all the CPUs are dog slow but massively multicore because that's useful for orchestration to the GPUs, which is what they were for - oh, and obviously they're all full of ECC ram which most consumer boards won't take. It'd be pretty hard to repurpose them to anything end-user facing.

* We did a cloud migration thing, and now we're not allowed to use any on-prem iron any more because otherwise we're not "Getting best value" from the cloud, but the on-prem machines still have a book value too high to get rid of, but not high enough for one of the finance team to take the time out of their busy schedule to establish if they have any actual resale value and try and move them on, so there they sit...

You seem to be underestimating the huge value of beancounter's time. I'm sure everything they're doing is perfectly optimised.

Unless manufacturers/corporates landfill the lot and write it off as a "tax loss"

No thanks I think I will use my 17 year old computer instead; it has 4 GB of Ram.

Thanks for letting us know.

You showoff!