am I crazy for thinking that the 16GB Pi 5 is just there to absorb money from people who purchase the most expensive version of things? Like really nobody needs that much RAM on a Pi?
DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
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Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#72The SBC markets been on life support for a long time. Youtubers making videos about them don't seem to grasp that and keep pumping out reviews and projects like its still 2019. The pi specifically has plummeted in popularity and for most use cases they just aren't a cost effective option when second hand micro pcs are dirt cheap and vastly more capable.
I don't think comparing new Pis to used micro pcs is fair. Compare a _used_ Pi with a used micro pc. If you have any geek friends, it's probably not hard to find a used Pi for free.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#73The extreme DRAM market has had an unexpected side effect of triggering a lot of panic buying. I know several people who delayed PC upgrades for years but then panic bought new systems in this market. The trigger was seeing all of the "It's only going to get worse" and "This is the end of personal computing" headlines.
They're already regretting spending so much now that prices have started to tick downward.
I keep telling everyone: If you don't have a pressing need to buy right now, please wait 6 months and check again.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#74Got my RPi 5 16GB quite a while ago for around $160 and already thought that was expensive... It’s still powerful enough for almost everything I throw at it, honestly a bit overkill in most scenarios. With prices steadily going up, for me it's starting to feel more sensible to repurpose the RAM sticks I've collected from old PC builds / laptops and just throw together small amd64 boxes instead of buying more RPis.
I wonder if there are low power Intel or AMD boards that accept DDR3. So many sticks of 2 / 4 / 8GB DDR3 inside laptops going into recycling or landfills which would do perfectly fine for low power purposes. Hell, performance for standard workloads scales with access times, not bandwidth, and DDR3 sits nicely at CAS8 1600MHz and CAS10 2133MHz..
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Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#75Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#76> The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99. Meanwhile, a refurbished corporate laptop with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD can be yours for $199 [1] I'm sure there will still be people who want the Pi 5 but at these prices, I ain't one of them. [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/327079631563
Those will dry up soon enough. Corporate laptop refreshes will be drawn out as they try and cost save on the increased price. You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM out of those things because they will start harvesting it for sure if there is money to made.
The EDU Neo is $500, too bad it’s not as versatile.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#77The SBC markets been on life support for a long time. Youtubers making videos about them don't seem to grasp that and keep pumping out reviews and projects like its still 2019. The pi specifically has plummeted in popularity and for most use cases they just aren't a cost effective option when second hand micro pcs are dirt cheap and vastly more capable.
PCs don't have GPIO. They're different markets and the desktop replacement never materialized.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The art is not lost, just not funded. Feel free to fund the programmers for your own software projects.
It isnt lost but it also isnt a common skill set in programmers any more. Most programmers are JS web devs writing client side code or server side CRUD. I would guess < 10% of programmers writing code today get perf / valgrind out on the regular. I know I dont.
You can still write JS or TypeScript code that tries its best to keep memory use under check. JavaScript was around in the late 90s when the memory footprint of software was at least an order of magnitude lower, so it's absolutely doable.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#79am I crazy for thinking that the 16GB Pi 5 is just there to absorb money from people who purchase the most expensive version of things? Like really nobody needs that much RAM on a Pi?
Most Pis are sold for embedded customers, some of which no doubt can use 16gb.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#80am I crazy for thinking that the 16GB Pi 5 is just there to absorb money from people who purchase the most expensive version of things? Like really nobody needs that much RAM on a Pi?
It’s an incredibly lopsided machine. The Pi 5 is decently powerful, but you really really should not be attempting to use one as a desktop replacement. While theoretically possible you are so much better off with a $50 used SFF PC.