Unless you have a true, irreplaceable need for a 16GB model, everyone should just pretend they don't exist.
Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at. Now that the people who need a desktop or server have re-discovered that they're better off using an actual desktop or an actual server for their purposes, we should get back to treating these like embedded systems boards.
The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
>The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
My family (n=3) owned the Huawei P20 Pro (acquired at the same time in the same promo, perhaps the same batch?). This product line seems to have serious issues with battery swelling. Each phone had spicy pillows at some point within 2 years of ownership. Even outside the warranty period, Huawei was willing to replace the battery at their cost, at their contracted Toronto repair centre. Each of the repaired phones had their spicy pillows return within 6-9 months. Huawei was still willing to repair the phones, but at that point I'd rather have recycled it. I strongly suspect Huawei was avoiding doing a voluntary recall and triaging it through their RMA process, given how little resistance their customer support put up (they immediately sent back an RMA label without requiring any pictures).
There is Android TalkBack (for poor vision) which is available on first boot/factory reset that narrates the menu. Even with a completely broken screen you can get ADB set up.
Not in my area at least. People gut the RAM from them now to sell separately for profit, and often the HDD too for privacy, so you're basically buying a paper weight that's a motherboard in a shell.
There's laptops or X86 tablets with soldered RAM but those are rare and vanish immediately if they show up at a good price.
Sure... but... the original $35 RasPi is closer to a modern RasPi Zero 1, which looks like it's selling for $45 - $50 on Amazon.
Modern top-of-the-line RasPis seem more like ARM PCs with fast, efficient multi-core CPUs and GigE. I bought a RasPi 500 at the beginning of the year just to see what it was like and it's my new "email and light web browsing" daily-driver. Though yeah, I probably wouldn't have paid $410 for it.
I bought my original RasPi mostly for the I/O. I wanted to blink some lights, drive some servos. And if I wanted to do that again, I would probably buy a Pico or Zero.
If you need GPIO pins, ESP32 is good enough for lots of use cases. If you just need a small low-power PC, used enterprise thin clients and mini-pc's (google project superminimicro) offer more while still idling around 10W or less. Those can be still bought for like 40-100 USD with SSD and 8GB or more RAM included.
I think Raspberry Pi is worth it only for some niche use-cases with current prices.
Presumably the only customers buying Pis right now are companies who use them in their products. There are much better options on the used market for people needing small computers/servers.
You know, a RPi 5 1GB is $77, 4GB is $109, 8GB is $170 and 16GB is $385. None of it makes sense, especially if anyone starts a reballing shop.
I was looking to try out Joel's TrueNAS on ARM this time with a Pi 5, a PoE and NVMe Hat ... I decided against it and ended up getting a good old cheap x86 compact NAS instead.
It will stop when the data center bubble bursts. Right now a small group of companies are borrowing huge amounts of money to corner the market in compute in order to use it for AI. But there's no evidence that real AI revenue (as opposed to more borrowed money) will grow fast enough for them to pay for that debt, or that profit margins will be sufficient to make it worth it over the window they need to start recouping. When that realization hits the lenders and investors and the capital spigot shuts off, prices will crash. I think it will be very similar to a precious metals run-up.
ESP32 devices are still cheap enough but with a less-good ecosystems due to the Pi's popularity. I do plan on picking up a few Pi 2 Ws which are still selling at a MicroCenter near me for $18 with only three bucks of markup just for setting up a Pi-Hole and some other IoT project but yeah, looking at even the Chinese made boards like Raspberry Orange sees prices north of $70 which is just not worth it for something with this capability. At this point, why not just get a refurb'd thin client or mini-pc?
Esp32 is pretty damn powerful for the cost. We have one driving a display and keyboard, speaking and playing synthesize sounds through attached sound chip, driving an ADC over SPI at a high rate and talking Bluetooth to an attached device and talking wifi to the cloud. On a device that costs a few bucks.
My 4 is, but only after a good while as my home server until I bumped up against the limitations of the hardware and upgraded to a proper server. So I suppose it did its job as a home lab gateway drug.
Yeah, currently I have a 3B, 2B and an original wifi-free zero in a drawer.
The 3B was my Octoprint server for the longest time while I was testing the 4B for a product, but for reasons I don't really understand, the 3B isn't quite punchy enough for Klipper, when it fully should be; it drops connections to the printer. I think any of them may continue to have some uses but perhaps not till I move to a new place.
Haven't gone for a 5B or Zero 2W yet, don't really need to. Rather more interested in what happens with the Picos these days.
I keep thinking that the AI gold rush is not an AI gold rush at all. It is a way to monopolize computing in 2 steps:
1) AI really does require a scaleup in compute power. In other words: you will be upgrading your hardware or use old software.
2) the AI buildout means you can't buy the hardware, you can only rent it "in the cloud".
It only works, of course, if Amazon and Google and Meta and ... keep buying for another 2-3 years but that seems to be exactly what's happening.
Worst of all: monopolies used to at least require investment. But Amazon and Google aren't investing, really. They're still net profitable companies. It's almost insulting.
The prices are crazy, but the uncertainty makes the choices even harder. I have my eyes on a Framework laptop 13 for some time. I was considering buying it with less RAM now, and then buying more RAM later. Now what I fear is: by the time RAM prices become reasonable, we might as well be using DDR7. So, even with a custom-built desktop PC or a Framework laptop it would be a pity to have to upgrade everything. On the other hand, it may well be our new reality, so maybe better buying in into 64GB RAM now? Not even sure if my reasoning is correct.
As a 53 year old, I've been starting to feel like there's a very real chance I will never buy another brand new computer (for personal use), phone or gaming console in my lifetime, which would be very surprising if you told this to me ~2 years ago.
If my computer fails, I have plenty of old components from older systems that I can swap in. I also have quite a few old phones (my primary job over the past decade has been Android development, so I have older test devices that still function fine for my purposes). And consoles are just very optional (and way more costly than I am willing to pay) when they start costing $1500+.
Overall there are some positives from this, I'll be responsible for less e-waste. This is something I always tried to be cognizant of in the first place, but the economics will really force my hand even more.
Of course, things aren't all that great considering we got into this situation due to technology running in large datacenters running on lots of dirty power like methane turbines.
If you just want a computer, an Ayn Thor is +$90. It comes with 1TB of UFS 3.1 storage, not one but two fantastic OLED screens, nice joysticks, speakers, and it's much much much faster.
And it runs a fantastic CachyOS (a super tuned Arch) install, called ArmadaOS,
https://armadaos.dev/
2026 has been pretty amazing, with the slow work upstreaming Qualcomm support really building. A bunch of really great chipsets have mainline support and actually work. The Thor is a bit behind SM8550, but SM8650 and SM8750 handhelds are also available (just a bit pricier, and non-dual screen yet).
Alas most phones don't have unlockable boot loaders. I'm anti-interested in the sad experience of Android, being unable to read my own files off my device. I really want to be able to read my chrome profile data, for reasons. Absolutely no go.
He has seemingly been doing a mostly second channel stuff lately. Those rarely make the front page as they are usually just "here is a thing I personally found interesting" projects.
[delayed]
Unless you have a true, irreplaceable need for a 16GB model, everyone should just pretend they don't exist.
Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at. Now that the people who need a desktop or server have re-discovered that they're better off using an actual desktop or an actual server for their purposes, we should get back to treating these like embedded systems boards.
I'm buying up broken screen old Android smartphone instead.
For example I got several broken screen Huawei P20s from 2018, they were 10€ each. 128GB storage with 4GB RAM https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_p20-9107.php
They boot up, you can install termux and then whatever is your choice of Linux software. I run several copyparty instances for friends and family
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/
https://github.com/9001/copyparty
The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
>Huawei P20
>The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
My family (n=3) owned the Huawei P20 Pro (acquired at the same time in the same promo, perhaps the same batch?). This product line seems to have serious issues with battery swelling. Each phone had spicy pillows at some point within 2 years of ownership. Even outside the warranty period, Huawei was willing to replace the battery at their cost, at their contracted Toronto repair centre. Each of the repaired phones had their spicy pillows return within 6-9 months. Huawei was still willing to repair the phones, but at that point I'd rather have recycled it. I strongly suspect Huawei was avoiding doing a voluntary recall and triaging it through their RMA process, given how little resistance their customer support put up (they immediately sent back an RMA label without requiring any pictures).
Android TV boxes are also great.
Slightly more expensive but you won't have to deal with battery health and the new ones come with a 1GB NIC and USB 3 ports!
I've always had bad luck with those. They very quickly start running poorly, maybe because the flash worn out.
... and they're locked down. Aren't they? What box would you recommend?
To add onto this for others.
There is Android TalkBack (for poor vision) which is available on first boot/factory reset that narrates the menu. Even with a completely broken screen you can get ADB set up.
Was considering doing the same until I found a couple old pine64 on eBay for ~$25 (2016, 4 core allwinner CPU, 2gb ddr3)
Sometimes there are pretty good deals on laptops, especially off lease. I've seen some $400-500 w/ 32GB RAM pop up on Slickdeals every few months.
You can get plenty of mini PCs, used computers and used phones in that price range. They aren’t a substitute for owning a raspberry pi though.
How are you getting GPIO?
Most likely he doesn't use GPIO, if it's just a tailscale/pi-hole client or something like that.
If you REALLY need GPIO then add a USB-C OTG MCU board like a ESP32, or even the ancient Arduino Uno works as USB GPIO via serial TTY on Android.
Or just use a ESP32 by itself if you don't need a full Linux OS to toggle some GPIO pins.
How did you get into the phones with broken screen?
The screen glass is cracked but you can still read what's on the display to root it.
are you running an EOL OS with an unpatchable kernel? phones have a lot of limitations as general purpose computers
Or buy used laptops with defects like broken screen or keyboard from FB marketplace.
Not in my area at least. People gut the RAM from them now to sell separately for profit, and often the HDD too for privacy, so you're basically buying a paper weight that's a motherboard in a shell.
There's laptops or X86 tablets with soldered RAM but those are rare and vanish immediately if they show up at a good price.
this is the way. samsung dex is pretty awesome to turn them into pseudo desktop computers.
Sure... but... the original $35 RasPi is closer to a modern RasPi Zero 1, which looks like it's selling for $45 - $50 on Amazon.
Modern top-of-the-line RasPis seem more like ARM PCs with fast, efficient multi-core CPUs and GigE. I bought a RasPi 500 at the beginning of the year just to see what it was like and it's my new "email and light web browsing" daily-driver. Though yeah, I probably wouldn't have paid $410 for it.
I bought my original RasPi mostly for the I/O. I wanted to blink some lights, drive some servos. And if I wanted to do that again, I would probably buy a Pico or Zero.
> Sure... but... the original $35 RasPi is closer to a modern RasPi Zero 1, which looks like it's selling for $45 - $50 on Amazon.
Yeah, because a second-hand 13-year-old computer is gonna last quite a long time.
A 13 year old computer is gonna use a lot more power than a RPi, that's for sure.
If you need GPIO pins, ESP32 is good enough for lots of use cases. If you just need a small low-power PC, used enterprise thin clients and mini-pc's (google project superminimicro) offer more while still idling around 10W or less. Those can be still bought for like 40-100 USD with SSD and 8GB or more RAM included.
I think Raspberry Pi is worth it only for some niche use-cases with current prices.
Yeah, you can also combine and use both and still come out ahead.
ESP32 handles IO and streams data somewhere else that does any processing needed on more powerful hardware.
Presumably the only customers buying Pis right now are companies who use them in their products. There are much better options on the used market for people needing small computers/servers.
> There are much better options on the used market for people needing small computers/servers.
Most people realized that the Raspberry Pi was never a great desktop or server replacement a long time ago.
It's an embedded system and it's best when used for embedded applications.
These are still purchased and used by hobbyists, but the people who were trying to use them as servers or desktops are not the target audience.
You know, a RPi 5 1GB is $77, 4GB is $109, 8GB is $170 and 16GB is $385. None of it makes sense, especially if anyone starts a reballing shop.
I was looking to try out Joel's TrueNAS on ARM this time with a Pi 5, a PoE and NVMe Hat ... I decided against it and ended up getting a good old cheap x86 compact NAS instead.
The pricing is off.
> You know, a RPi 5 1GB is $77, 4GB is $109, 8GB is $170 and 16GB is $385. None of it makes sense, especially if anyone starts a reballing shop.
Reballing the RAM of the Raspberry Pi is blocked by its firmware:
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2380887#p2380...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49786689
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
EDIT: See also https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/raspberry-pi-ram-lock... linked under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50429356
The disruption to consumer electronics, both PCs and SBCs, will last for several years at minimum
I think we'll see prices crash within 12 months, because I don't think the data center bubble will last that long.
It will stop when the data center bubble bursts. Right now a small group of companies are borrowing huge amounts of money to corner the market in compute in order to use it for AI. But there's no evidence that real AI revenue (as opposed to more borrowed money) will grow fast enough for them to pay for that debt, or that profit margins will be sufficient to make it worth it over the window they need to start recouping. When that realization hits the lenders and investors and the capital spigot shuts off, prices will crash. I think it will be very similar to a precious metals run-up.
ESP32 devices are still cheap enough but with a less-good ecosystems due to the Pi's popularity. I do plan on picking up a few Pi 2 Ws which are still selling at a MicroCenter near me for $18 with only three bucks of markup just for setting up a Pi-Hole and some other IoT project but yeah, looking at even the Chinese made boards like Raspberry Orange sees prices north of $70 which is just not worth it for something with this capability. At this point, why not just get a refurb'd thin client or mini-pc?
Esp32 is pretty damn powerful for the cost. We have one driving a display and keyboard, speaking and playing synthesize sounds through attached sound chip, driving an ADC over SPI at a high rate and talking Bluetooth to an attached device and talking wifi to the cloud. On a device that costs a few bucks.
And it all started with $32. Also 16GB of RAM is a lot for RPi, IMO.
Someone said 640kB is enough for everyone.
I bought this at launch and didn’t think much. It’s weird seeing price go up as much.
Used laptops have always been a better value.
Look, it's a misallocation of resources for you to own any RAM at all, and you should thank Sam Altman for letting you have some at any price.
This strategy is designed to protect their margins so nobody can self-host similarly capable models.
Unfortunately there is no appetite for governments to step in.
Is it a worse misallocation, I wonder, than doing what most people do with Raspberry Pis, which is leave it in a drawer ;-)
My 4 is, but only after a good while as my home server until I bumped up against the limitations of the hardware and upgraded to a proper server. So I suppose it did its job as a home lab gateway drug.
Yeah, currently I have a 3B, 2B and an original wifi-free zero in a drawer.
The 3B was my Octoprint server for the longest time while I was testing the 4B for a product, but for reasons I don't really understand, the 3B isn't quite punchy enough for Klipper, when it fully should be; it drops connections to the printer. I think any of them may continue to have some uses but perhaps not till I move to a new place.
Haven't gone for a 5B or Zero 2W yet, don't really need to. Rather more interested in what happens with the Picos these days.
make a 128GB version and call it Raspberry Ai
What on earth are these SKUs even targeting? 16GB in a raspi is nuts.
You are one executive order [0] behind, and are legally required to call it the Raspberry Si
0: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inau...
I keep thinking that the AI gold rush is not an AI gold rush at all. It is a way to monopolize computing in 2 steps:
1) AI really does require a scaleup in compute power. In other words: you will be upgrading your hardware or use old software.
2) the AI buildout means you can't buy the hardware, you can only rent it "in the cloud".
It only works, of course, if Amazon and Google and Meta and ... keep buying for another 2-3 years but that seems to be exactly what's happening.
Worst of all: monopolies used to at least require investment. But Amazon and Google aren't investing, really. They're still net profitable companies. It's almost insulting.
The prices are crazy, but the uncertainty makes the choices even harder. I have my eyes on a Framework laptop 13 for some time. I was considering buying it with less RAM now, and then buying more RAM later. Now what I fear is: by the time RAM prices become reasonable, we might as well be using DDR7. So, even with a custom-built desktop PC or a Framework laptop it would be a pity to have to upgrade everything. On the other hand, it may well be our new reality, so maybe better buying in into 64GB RAM now? Not even sure if my reasoning is correct.
Why do you want Pi5 if you can get a smartphone with a screen?
Because a smartphone is locked down by default. I'm sure there's lots you can't just easily do with it.
The development experience of something like Android itself seems super unfriendly for beginners (as someone who is admittedly a beginner to it)
There is a lot of AI-aided effort going on "hacking" the bootloaders. Hopefully someone will figure out how to unlock them.
Do you think perhaps there are reasons other than using ... a smartphone?
As a 53 year old, I've been starting to feel like there's a very real chance I will never buy another brand new computer (for personal use), phone or gaming console in my lifetime, which would be very surprising if you told this to me ~2 years ago.
If my computer fails, I have plenty of old components from older systems that I can swap in. I also have quite a few old phones (my primary job over the past decade has been Android development, so I have older test devices that still function fine for my purposes). And consoles are just very optional (and way more costly than I am willing to pay) when they start costing $1500+.
Overall there are some positives from this, I'll be responsible for less e-waste. This is something I always tried to be cognizant of in the first place, but the economics will really force my hand even more.
Of course, things aren't all that great considering we got into this situation due to technology running in large datacenters running on lots of dirty power like methane turbines.
I don't understand? Should they be sold at a lower price when people are still willing to buy at the current higher price?
It isn’t even about people willing to buy at $X. The Pi foundation has to pay for RAM like everyone else.
No. They are greedy bastards:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/raspberry-pi-ram-lock...
The purpose of the Pi is affordable computing for learning. That's pointless if the system is very expensive.
the original pi launched in 2012 for like $35 I think
the pi5 1GB model is now $45, so with inflation etc that's not too bad considering the feature set.
However, getting your hands on a 1GB model these days is practically impossible unless you go used.
People are going to have to learn to program with less RAM....
one could argue America is forcing China to learn how to program better via it's GPU sanctions.
Not really anymore, no.
The Foundation and the Trading Company have different goals, and the Foundation is not wedded to the Linux SBC Pi at all for this.
Physical computing education with Python is more than adequately served by the RP2040 and RP2350, and that is more or less where their focus is.
(Beyond that I think most of this is just geek whining, to be honest.)
a perfectly serviceable new rpi 3 is available for $39
So they should dissolve the organization because RAM is expensive?
It was their stated mission, yes.
'Our mission is to put high-performance, low-cost, general-purpose computing platforms in the hands of people and organisations all over the world,'
Hard to do that when you keep jacking the prices up.
It's a matter of RAM costs, rather than profit seeking, no?
Actually, I am happy that mess has lead to people finally questioning if a calculator really needs a full browser backend and use 4GB.
I mean, sucks to be a buyer right now but as a developer I like where things are heading :( :)
Or even a WiFi stack (looking at you ESP32).
If you just want a computer, an Ayn Thor is +$90. It comes with 1TB of UFS 3.1 storage, not one but two fantastic OLED screens, nice joysticks, speakers, and it's much much much faster.
And it runs a fantastic CachyOS (a super tuned Arch) install, called ArmadaOS, https://armadaos.dev/
2026 has been pretty amazing, with the slow work upstreaming Qualcomm support really building. A bunch of really great chipsets have mainline support and actually work. The Thor is a bit behind SM8550, but SM8650 and SM8750 handhelds are also available (just a bit pricier, and non-dual screen yet).
Alas most phones don't have unlockable boot loaders. I'm anti-interested in the sad experience of Android, being unable to read my own files off my device. I really want to be able to read my chrome profile data, for reasons. Absolutely no go.
Speaking of, it's been a while since I've seen a jeff geerling submission on HN front page.
He has seemingly been doing a mostly second channel stuff lately. Those rarely make the front page as they are usually just "here is a thing I personally found interesting" projects.
Thankfully greedy Raspberry PI locked down memory upgrades, so nobody can save money by soldering off market chips.
2032