Mastodawn

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 thread

jonathantf2 5d 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 thread

dangus 5d ago

That’s strange, there aren’t wider market supply chain issues outside of DRAM. Maybe your vendor is just throwing excuses around.

Show thread

CTDOCodebases 5d ago

Fuel price rises = logistics price rises.

Show thread

michaelt

You're right that fuel prices have risen. But usually the impact of fuel prices is mostly felt on bulkier, lower cost items first.

After all, a truck can carry a 10kg sack of rice, or a 10kg nvidia gpu. If shipping costs for 10kg rise by $15 the sack of rice has doubled in price, but the GPU is only 0.5% more expensive.