ingve5d ago

DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/dram-pricing-is-killing-the-hobbyist-sbc-market/

DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

Today Raspberry Pi announced more price increases for all Pis with LPDDR4 RAM, alongside a 'right-sized' 3GB RAM Pi 4 for $83.75. The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99. Despite today's date, this is not a joke. I published a video going over the state of the hobbyist 'high end SBC' market (4/8/16 GB models in the current generation), which I'll embed below: But if you'd like the tl;dr:

Jeff Geerling
Show threadjonathantf25d ago

DRAM pricing is killing the everything market.

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

Show threadzie

At work we just got a quote to upgrade a couple servers, original price a few years ago was ~ $150k. Essentially the same hardware, just newer, is now quoted at ~ $450k.

We decided to just keep our current hardware for now and extend a support contract for ~ normal price.

Apr 1 at 10:29pmWeb