But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1 billion. Our projections are that we might drop to 800 million this year, and down to 500 or 600 million next year.

We look at data points out of China from some of our analysts in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They’ve been tracking this, and they see Xiaomi and Oppo cutting low-end and mid-range smartphone volumes by half.

Yes, it’s only a $150 BOM increase on a $1,000 iPhone where Apple has some larger margin. But for smaller phones, the percentage of the BOM that goes to memory and storage is much larger. And the margins are lower, so there’s less capacity to even eat the margins. And they have also generally tended not to do long-term agreements on memory.

Why this is a big deal is that if smartphone volumes halve, that drop will happen in the low and mid-range, not the high end.

It looks like the current price on Amazon for the Raspberry Pi 4 4GB is ¥18,800 (~$117 at current rates), which is indeed expensive AF. Oddly, the Raspberry Pi 5 4GB is priced about the same, at ¥18,950 (~$119).

Considering inflation and the speed increases over the 4, the Raspberry Pi 5 price doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. But having the price go up well over ¥10,000 definitely takes it out of the realm of impulse buy and more into something I would only buy if I had a specific and urgent need. So I can definitely see this killing off a good chunk of the hobbyist market.

As it stands, my two older Pis are currently sitting unused in a closet, so I would definitely try to use those before buying anything new.

My big regret at the moment is not buying a 4TB M.2 SSD last year when prices were dipping down below ¥30,000. Now they have more than doubled to ¥65,000 or more. I had one in my cart, but decided not to buy it with the rationale that "well I still don't need the space right now, and the price per TB will probably come down even further by the time I do need it". That is, after all, the way that prices on computer component have worked for most of my life.

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

I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.

The Raspberry Pi 3B 1GB is $35 on CanaKit, Adafruit. The 3B+ is on PiShop for $40.

The Raspberry Pi 3A+ 512MB is $25 on CanaKit, Adafruit, PiShop, SparkFun.

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is $16.35 on CanaKit, $17.25 on PiShop.

We are unavoidably headed at financial collapse, authoritarianism, and potentially the collapse of Western civilization. And ya'll are worried that you won't have 8GB of RAM in an embedded GPIO computer for your hobby? Maybe it's time to make the ultimate sacrifice: use less RAM.

I remember 15-20 years ago when hard drive prices went up through the roof because there was a flood in Thailand and it too years for prices to come down.

There is going to be supply chain issues due to the current Geopolitical situation (Helium comes out of the Gulf and that is need in chip manufacture) is also going to affect the price of components.

Eventually in a few years (as the article states) the situation will change. It just sucks at the moment.

TBH I am more worried about my ability to fill up the tank on my car as both Petrol and Diesel is unavailable locally. I can make do with whatever computer equipment I have.

We just had a vendor uplift our quote 50% per unit for some machines because of a mix of memory + supply chain issues.

or to teach that again

Maybe the company will extend the availability of the Model 2b for a few more years and release versions with less RAM (<= 500 MB)?

Unfortunately I don't see this reversing until HBM demand plateaus or new fabs come online, which is 2-3 years out at minimum.

1. Shifting Hobbyist Focus: Because hobbyists typically prefer parts under the $100 mark (so they don't "fret over breaking them"), the community is shifting away from modern, high-powered SBCs. Instead, people are moving toward:

2. Older SBC models (like the Pi 3 or 4 with lower RAM).

3. Microcontrollers (like the RP2040) which remain cheap. So Used hardware and "repurposing" old tech is retro trending again.

IMO, perhaps there will be push to make software/firmware more RAM efficient with AI assisted coding?

I remember my company buying RAM expansion boards for our PCs back in 1989 so we could run OS/2. The 4MB boards (MB! Not GB.) cost around $2000 at the time.

Like everyone, I love getting tons of RAM or SSD storage on the cheap; but we have a ways to go before we reach the 'unaffordable' level.

My preference is responsible AI development which prevents it from turning into an arms race but that’s clearly not on the cards, especially with current leadership.

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.

nowadays the price of these 2nd hand mini PCs has shot up, and even if you do get a chance to get one, upgrading it with more RAM is gonna be painful

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.

So timed that all pretty great. What worries me is my desktop is up for a full new buy somewhere around early '28. That could be a train wreck depending on how taiwan situation goes

A recent nationwide poll[1] shows AI has a poorer approval rating than ICE — ICE! — probably due to their overlords being "those" SV types. Everyday AI features are being shoved down our throats. I can't even choose to not install Gemini related apps on my Android when I select "which apps to install" when booting a new phone.

But people are a weird bunch. They largely don't buy products aligning with their values. No one is jumping up and down for Graphene phones even if they had amazing privacy first software. People buy 6mi/gal hummers and iPhones for fashion, brand, money, convenience/function. The pain threshold of all bad effects still is not high enough to quit their products in a meaningful way. Values and privacy are way down in their list. I wish people would not buy/install AI related features by big tech and be more discerning, but that is likely a pipe dream.

[1] https://pos.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/260072-NBC-March-...

I will not be buying any more SBC's at this price point. I wonder if Raspberry PI will survive.

Because we all know that DRAM prices have spiked since production is going to those infernal chatbot training data centers. Same as a lot of the electricity in some parts of the world, BTW.

I've been having fun getting Linux 7.0 running on my Milk-V Duo S, it's still available super cheap (though tariffs make buying single quantities expensive) so i stocked up on Duo boards. I guess I'm hoping for an upside where there's more interest in cheaper overstock boards from 2022+

how long does it take to increase manufacturing capacity? how long will the decision be postponed to increase manufacturing capacity? if AI skeptics are right and the bubble bursts, increasing capacity inordinately will prove a big mistake. if AI skeptics are wrong delaying increase of capacity indordinately will prove a big mistake.

In a sense we are forcing DRAM manufacturers to play the judge, jury and executioner:

If they don't increase capacity corresponding with AI boom, the DRAM prices may ultimately cause an AI winter.

If they do increase capacity (lowering per unit costs), the lower DRAM prices may enable AI summer to continue.

This looks like self-fulfilling prophecy scenario.

I was expecting the Milk V Titan to avoid this memory nonsense since it has two unpopulated DDR4 slots, but it has fallen off the radar like several other SBCs.

The idea of putting sixteen gigs of RAM in a raspberry pi is nuts. The legit thing you want to use a raspberry pi (or a competitor) for as an embedded headless thing with no KB/mouse/display attached should run fine in 2GB of RAM or less, assuming an ordinary debian-based OS environment.

I would much rather have a used, ex-corporate/ex-lease, small form factor or ultra small form factor x86-64 desktop PC (Dell, HP, Lenovo, whatever) with 16GB of RAM in it and an SSD on a SATA3 or NVME interface. Whatever is the "best" SFF that you can buy via huge eBay used equipment dealers on any given month.

Despite being many years old, whatever you can buy on ebay for 200 bucks (at least before the recent RAM fiasco) with some recent-ish quad core core i5/i7 or Ryzen in it will run circles around a raspberry pi 5.

Yes, a $250 mini PC I bought last year is now $350.

Is this pricing bad? Yeah, compared to what it was.

Is this the end of the world? Not really, and we’ve seen price spikes for all kinds of PC components in the past. It’s rarely permanent.

I love capitalism; its ability to allocate resources on a macroeconomic scale to pick winners and more-importantly losers doesn't have a rival system. As a younger, more naive startup employee, I'm on the record making a total fool of myself responding to our CEO talking about struggling to find PMF by saying "then maybe our company doesn't deserve to exist" (yeah...) But the "capitalists" who run the world aren't actually interested in capitalism, and thus definitionally can't be capitalists. At least once upon a time we had filthy rich titans you could look up to, like Buffet and Gates (Epstein stuff aside); but at this point most of them aren't even enviable people. Despite being richer than God, people like Huang, Musk, Ellison, and Zuckerberg feel more like vampires; they want to spend their whole lives doing the exact same thing, getting richer and richer, refusing to put a ladder down for anyone else to take a shot at improving on what they've built. I actually have a modicum of respect for Bezos and, to whatever vanishingly small degree, Trump; at least they're trying something different.