DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market • Hacker News Board

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#421

Post by Hendrikto » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:47 AM UTC

leptons wrote: post #346

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I believe helium, although important constitutes a small percent of the cost of semiconductors, so its effect on price will be less severe. It will be more noticeable in other uses of helium though - party balloons could get very expensive etc.

Considering helium is a finite resource on earth, it should be made illegal to put it in a party balloon.

It’s not illegal to put gas in your car. That is a finite resource too.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#422

Post by kasabali » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:51 AM UTC

jorvi wrote: post #53

Lwrless wrote: post #37

Got 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..

Dell Optiplex 3040 or some configurations of Lenovo M700 may be using 6th gen Intel CPU with DDR3.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#423

Post by DevCrate » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:59 AM UTC

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Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#424

Post by ReptileMan » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 10:02 AM UTC

heraldgeezer wrote: post #412

karimf wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is huge problem for developing countries. Most people here have $100-$200 phones. iPhone is a luxury.

[flagged]

Won't matter - if enough people in developing countries can afford iphones, apple will just rise the prices.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#425

Post by zozbot234 » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 10:10 AM UTC

close04 wrote: post #417

zozbot234 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OnePlus 5 runs great with custom ROMs, including potentially ones based on mainline Linux as opposed to AOSP. (The Linux support is not as good as OP 6/6T but getting there pretty nicely.)

Too bad they have these long lists of "this doesn't work so well" and I'm too time constrained to troubleshoot for too long or dig for solutions. And I'd also need to replace the battery. It's an option for when I actually have some time. The device integrity is a bigger deal, this is also a backup for some banking apps so if they don't work it kind of defeats the purpose. I removed all other apps to minimize the att…

If you're using it as backup for banking apps and the like I totally get not running a custom ROM on it! But you could also set that backup on something even cheaper, any one of the random not-bootloader-unlockable brands, and be left with the OP5 as a Linux phone. You're also right that the Linux support on OP5 is not up to standard yet, this is more of a question for the future if that support improves.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#426

Post by citrin_ru » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 10:21 AM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #379

AngryData wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it. I guess you could do technically do that with the fab's air but it is a LOT of volume of air to liquefy and likely costs more than even inflated helium prices. Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration, and I imagine even the best case scen…

> Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it. This is wild. I never thought about how they separated gases from natural gas fields. The carbon footprint of each kg of that helium must be astonishingly large.

I hope systems which separate helium: 1. have very good thermal insulation 2. use heat exchangers so separated gases can cool down incoming gas.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#427

Post by extraduder_ire » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 10:24 AM UTC

AngryData wrote: post #138

Dylan16807 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultra clean rooms with massive air handling systems can't recapture all their helium? Or is this just a temporary thing based on where processing is located?

Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it. I guess you could do technically do that with the fab's air but it is a LOT of volume of air to liquefy and likely costs more than even inflated helium prices. Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration, and I imagine even the best case scen…

> Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration

I remember a similar situation with neon early in the Ukraine invasion a few years ago. What I expect to happen is some other source coming online that currently doesn't try to capture it for economic reasons.

Helium recovery in scientific settings for cost saving reasons is already done, so it's not like there isn't expertise in using it.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#428

Post by extraduder_ire » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 10:28 AM UTC

jaggederest wrote: post #245

rcxdude wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helium is actually pretty hard to keep ahold of, being a very light and small noble gas. It can diffuse through a surprising amount of materials, flow through far smaller cracks than you would expect, and is quite hard to filter out of a mixture of gases.

Also superfluid helium (a big chunk of helium used for refrigeration like in e.g. the LHC) has the weird property of flowing the same speed through a tiny hole as a large one and coating everything with a molecular coating. Superfluid helium is basically a bose einstein condensate but macro-scale, totally counterintuitive. Essentially a thermal superconductor. Zero viscosity.

Unless you need it to be less than 3 kelvin for some reason, helium doesn't do that.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#429

Post by crote » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC

jeffreygoesto wrote: post #420

lelanthran wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months. I don't think they do that at the low-end (nor the high-end, though that doesn't matter here - higher-end manufacturers have a small margin they can eat into). People on the low-end phones want a new phone, they just cannot af…

But why? I just replaced my Huawei P20 after eight years and only because nobody cares about app sizes and compatibility.

You just answered your own question.

There's also the issue of phones occasionally getting broken, of course.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#430

Post by extraduder_ire » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC

KPGv2 wrote: post #279

chromacity wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even before the hikes, SBCs were $50-$100 a pop, compared to pennies for basic MCUs and maybe $4 for high-performance ones. People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem ("hats", forums, etc). I don't know if 300x is going to make more hobbyists see the light, or just result in fewer of them being able to afford the hobby?

> People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem This is obviously logical. If I know how to program in Python or JS but not C and am familiar with SSH, I can do something with a SBC in a few minutes. I get paid $200/hr. If I spent even one hour to learn what I need to deal with a microcontroller, the time cost is four times the cost of materials if I stick with what I know. How m…

Most of the "professional" microcontrollers have complicated flashing schemes, expensive bespoke IDEs, and limited language support. Treating a lot of that like a moat around their products.

I find it remarkable that they haven't tried to make all of that easier. Any board with arduino support is easy to start using, with pared down c++, boards similar to the micro:bit support micropython and javascript as well as a few others, and a ton of modern development boards have UF2 support.

UF2 is a step change in how easy it is to flash a binary onto a microcontroller. You hold down a button before connecting it to a USB port, and then it appears as a USB drive for you to drop a file onto, once it's done "copying" the board is flashed and will run your code as soon as it resets.

If you want to gain familiarity with a board, you can drop a .uf2 file with a REPL on it and run code on the board a line at a time.