Raspberry Pi is Cooked
Raspberry Pi announced today it will be increasing pricing on all of its models due to the ongoing RAM and NAND supply issues.
This is unfortunate but understandable considering that they are a small organisation relativly speaking but the thing is Raspberry Pis where already creeping up in price over the years long gone are the days of the £15 SBC thats for kids and hobbyists to tinker with. Even before this Pi 5s starter at about £45 for a 1GB ram model but now 8GB models are going for £168 16GB models are now going for an eye watering £292.
The Pi rose to prominence being a cheap and easy and power efficient board for tinkering or even as a server. I myself host my Home Assistant Server on a Pi and it's been great for that job but it's now impossible to recommend Pis for this use anymore.
This is doubly true with the rise of mini PCs coming out of china as well as the endles supply of Ex Corpo Dell/Lenovo/HP 1L PCs you can find on eBay. At the time of writing Dell OptiPlex 3060s with an 9th gen i5 8GB of ram and a a 256GB SSD can be had on eBay for about £150 or with 16GB Ram and 512GB SSD for about £190-£200.
These not only have way more power for the same cost they feature expandable/replacable Memory and SSDs meaning you can essentially turn these into a homelab in a box using either VM hypervisors like proxomox or my personal favourite method install Debian LTS on there ant then use Docker (or Podman if you're a sicko) to run all the Services via containers and a compose file. This is how my whole homelab is setup now and it works like a dream.
So while people before complained of Raspberry Pi loosing it's way it still did have some compelling use cases for the mainline Pis. But it's clear their future is not Hobbists but instead B2B and Industrial uses since they are the only ones who can justify the cost.
Last Edited: 2 days, 23 hours ago.