Ongoing RAM crisis prompts Raspberry Pi’s second price hike in two months
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I am really hoping that some tech startup somewhere is looking for a way to compete with Micron/Hynix/Samsung. Definitely not going to happen any time soon, but one can wish.
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At this rate, I'm on track to flip my stack of RPis for a new car by the end of the year.
This is crazy. Being a nerd is about to get even more expensive. Time for me to find a more analog hobby.
This is crazy. Being a nerd is about to get even more expensive. Time for me to find a more analog hobby.
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Just don't pick the same ones I did. RAM prices can still spike quite a bit more before they do as much damage to my bottom line as guitars, bikes, or camera lenses have over the years...
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price of bread goes up because some asshole plans to buy up next year's wheat with imaginary money from his unprofitable company.
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The 16gb Pi 5 for $205 is definitely a hard pill to swallow. You can get no-name N100 type mini-pcs for less than that price. At ~$200 you are also starting to see Zen 2/3 based mini-pcs and some intel i3 based ones too. Either of those should wipe the floor with a Pi or n100 system.
Realistically, the Chinese memory makers are the only possibility for that to happen. It costs way too much and takes way to long for anyone to quickly enter the market. Not just the fab construction but even figuring out how to manufacture the memory. CXMT is pursuing that but seems to still be behind on memory technology and definitely still smaller on manufacturing capacity. It will probably be a while before we can regularly buy desktop ram kits using their memory modules even without tariffs or other political blocks but I could definitely see them coming on the memory in those generic n100 mini-pcs or going into embedded systems being manufactured in China anyway (say the memory in your smart TV or cheap android tablet) soon enough. It's either going to be several years for production capacity to catch up or the AI bubble will have to pop. There really aren't any other answers.
Realistically, the Chinese memory makers are the only possibility for that to happen. It costs way too much and takes way to long for anyone to quickly enter the market. Not just the fab construction but even figuring out how to manufacture the memory. CXMT is pursuing that but seems to still be behind on memory technology and definitely still smaller on manufacturing capacity. It will probably be a while before we can regularly buy desktop ram kits using their memory modules even without tariffs or other political blocks but I could definitely see them coming on the memory in those generic n100 mini-pcs or going into embedded systems being manufactured in China anyway (say the memory in your smart TV or cheap android tablet) soon enough. It's either going to be several years for production capacity to catch up or the AI bubble will have to pop. There really aren't any other answers.
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Luckily, I bought my current set of SSDs early last year. Hope they will last a few years.
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Gamers Nexus reports that Chinese DRAM chips are already incorporated into existing RAM sticks from various brands.
View: https://youtu.be/qzfhhAfxK-A?si=G57v2amVaJ6zRhT7
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I'm really glad I ordered my 16GB board a week ago.
I'd noticed they were out of stock in most of my usual places, but found some on Mouser.
The stock seemed to dwindle by about 100/day so I'd suggest moving fast if you want one.
I'd noticed they were out of stock in most of my usual places, but found some on Mouser.
The stock seemed to dwindle by about 100/day so I'd suggest moving fast if you want one.
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In an updated article Andrew was flown to a resort to check on current price’s titled
“Pi rates of the Caribbean”
Purloined from a Reddit joke
“Pi rates of the Caribbean”
Purloined from a Reddit joke
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Yeah; I paid $220 for a 500+ and $99 for a 500 just a week ago; it was a bit of a panic buy after I slowly watched them dry up for a couple of weeks and I figured I'd try both and return one but now it feels like eBay might be the way forward. I'll just charge what I'd have received for a return, and make somebody happy.
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I'd say if you can find N100 mini-pcs for that price you should snap them up ASAP because they're getting hit with the same BoM bomb that the Raspberry Pi foundation is struggling with and their prices are likely to increase as well once the existing stocks are sold.
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This is the rare scenario where I actually believe the company/CEO intend to bring the price back down when they can afford to.
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At this point I've resigned the next few years to just buying as little as possible and actually using everything I've already bought but haven't got around to using. Both out of not having the money to fight the price increases and so I'm not constantly disappointed at this kind of news.
The fun part will be when something breaks and I have no choice but to buy inflated priced stuff.
The fun part will be when something breaks and I have no choice but to buy inflated priced stuff.
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there's little point, the issue is that orders have been placed for 60% of capacity, the problem though is there is now uncertainty that the orders will ever be paid for...
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At that price, you're about $30 to $50 away from a used M1 Mac Mini on eBay and that would be far more capable machine than a Pi and could do the same job at just a larger size
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GN does some of the highest quality reporting on this stuff I've seen anywhere. That video in particular was outstanding.
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It is illegal for individuals or groups to "corner" various markets, whether silver or onions.
I'm assuming it's legal (yet highly shady) to corner the RAM market, otherwise OpenAI wouldn't have tried and other large market participants would have sued them into oblivion for doing so.
So I'm curious why a Rep/Senator somewhere hasn't proposed some sort of legislative solution to prevent someone else from cornering the RAM, or flash, or CPU markets, etc. Because computers are absolutely vital infrastructure, far more so than OpenAI at this point.
If we don't have a law against it, it's likely to happen again and again.
I'm assuming it's legal (yet highly shady) to corner the RAM market, otherwise OpenAI wouldn't have tried and other large market participants would have sued them into oblivion for doing so.
So I'm curious why a Rep/Senator somewhere hasn't proposed some sort of legislative solution to prevent someone else from cornering the RAM, or flash, or CPU markets, etc. Because computers are absolutely vital infrastructure, far more so than OpenAI at this point.
If we don't have a law against it, it's likely to happen again and again.
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I was watching YouTube last night, and it threw up this little video at me.
View: https://youtu.be/T6eiFyJMWgM?si=OWM9ENZ-uS5f_mEK
In essence, this guy was bulk buying ex-corporate laptops and refurbishing them, but with the jump in the price of both RAM and SSDs, the recyclers that he was buying from are now finding it more profitable to just shuck the ram and SSDs out of the machines and sell them off.
I've also seen various (and possibly related) videos in which people are using adapters so that they can plug laptop sodimms into their desktop PCs!
We're in a distinctly wierd time for high end technology...
View: https://youtu.be/T6eiFyJMWgM?si=OWM9ENZ-uS5f_mEK
In essence, this guy was bulk buying ex-corporate laptops and refurbishing them, but with the jump in the price of both RAM and SSDs, the recyclers that he was buying from are now finding it more profitable to just shuck the ram and SSDs out of the machines and sell them off.
I've also seen various (and possibly related) videos in which people are using adapters so that they can plug laptop sodimms into their desktop PCs!
We're in a distinctly wierd time for high end technology...
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What you're describing there is a monopoly, where several people work together to control the supply of a commodity, usually in the hopes of controlling the price.
And said people are usually the suppliers of said commodity. E.g. OPEC.
What's happening here is that lots of companies individually want to make money out of the AI bubble, so have separately
Which is insane by any metric. But there y'go.
Equally, I don't doubt that at least some of them are trying to deny resources to their competitors; it's what happened to a lesser degree during COVID, when there was a huge rush to provide online services and many companies snapped up many more developers than they actually needed.
Sadly, it's harder to prove that's what they were doing, and therefore much harder to legislate against.
I'd also note that things don't always go that well for would-be resource monopolists, or the people working for said companies.
To take an example: back in the 1980s, there was a UK games company called Imagine, who for a brief while were riding very high on a wave of clever marketing and relatively (for the time) good games. Flush with success, they decided to buy up all available tape-duplication capacity in the runup to Christmas, with the aim of blocking other companies from releasing games and thereby giving Imagine a de facto monopoly over the Christmas charts.
What they hadn't counted on, was that the market had already peaked. And so, they found themselves stuck with masses of product they couldn't sell, and expensive bills for all that unused duplication capacity...
Alas, I fear that particular lesson has been lost to history.
On a brighter note, the odds are good that there'll be lots of cheap hardware available in a year or two. Unfortunately, this will probably be followed by a drought, as hardware manufacturers will almost certainly have to reduce production (or just go bankrupt) when this glut hits the market.
TL; DR: it's time to buckle up!
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I have a feeling this is a bigger deal than just higher prices. Imagine instead of ram, it was tires. "Probably won't be any tires for a couple years at least" "they're selling cars without tires now"
Why bring a new CPU to market if nobody can put ram in it? How will you consume AI if your computer is broken and unfixable?
Why bring a new CPU to market if nobody can put ram in it? How will you consume AI if your computer is broken and unfixable?
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And you should not ever consider complaining about the tariffs, since they will make you rich. /S
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A bit off topic, but I was surprised to hear inflation was only 2% in the US. That is astonishing with the tariff rollercoasters. It seems like the big disaster it was going to be was a bit overhyped. I have been reading for months now that people took in stock before the tariffs and that it soon will be sold out and that the real effects would kick in. Then again, that fed guy (the previous one) decidedly said that the effects have rippled through mostly. How do you experience this from day to day? It is hard to get a grasp of what is really happening these days because of all the inflated rethoric.
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I'm surprised that DDR4 is being affected by the shortage. I wouldn't have thought that AI datacenters would be using it. I suppose demand pressure is looking for any kind of outlet, plus the supply side are probably saying "oh there's a shortage of DDR5 and HBM? Guess it's time to use that an excuse to raise profits on our legacy production lines..."
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DDR4 had already been going up before this whole thing started. It was the legacy memory type and they were already starting to wind down production. The slow climb in price just went into overdrive when prices started going crazy in general. Seems like this time last year was about the best time to buy for DDR4.
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The models of Pi 5s with 8 and 16 gigs of RAM were already pretty questionable purchases before the price hikes and now they are way outside of the range of what I would be willing to pay for what they are. You can get other more powerful x86 systems for about the same price that include an NVMe SSD, if you want to use an NVMe SSD with the Pi 5 you have to provide one and buy an additional hat in order to do so raising the cost even more.
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PatientZero
Ars Centurion
...while I'm sure the CEO of RaspberryPi isn't a bad guy, if they actually drop their prices after the AI bubble bursts I'll eat my hat.
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Honestly, it makes the Rapsberry Pi such a bad option now. If you want the 8GB version, you're almost double the price of a used mini-PC with a 6th or 7th gen i5, which would come with the PSU, SATA, and upgradable RAM (probably DDR3, which is slower, but still cheap, you can still find 16GB kits for around $30, not that you would need it since most of them come with 8GB anyway). Let's not talk about the 16GB model, you can find something with an Intel N100 / N95 / N97 brand new for basically the same price (or even significantly cheaper if you want to buy a NVMe hat for the Pi 5 and an SSD instead of using a SD card). Unless you absolutely need the energy efficiency of the Pi (like you're powering it from a battery or from solar power) and the Zero isn't powerful enough, I don't see a single reason why you would buy a Pi for most projects nowadays, which is such a shame, I have fond memories of messing with my original Pi 1, my Zero, and my 400, but there's no way I can justify a Pi 5.
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