@root42 That's the excuse definitely. But it doesn't cost that much for the amount (and especially the lower grade) of RAM they put in there.

They were already getting ridiculous long before the current shortages. When they started going over $100 IMO that's when the hobby was already dying. RPi used to aim for a $35 device and that was what gave us a cheap, minimal, plentiful general computing device. But then they just sort of lost sight of all that.

It's not just price. They started just treating them as if they were some kind of full blown PCs. They stopped doing a super minimal, super optimized setup with specialized packages and configurations to make simple things doable in 256MB of RAM. Now you need 4+GB to use them well...

Raspberry Pi was killed by... Themselves.

@root42 I mean, yeah they got more powerful CPUs, but that doesn't mean they should have been treated as if they were PCs.

They had a specific niche. Super cheap, super minimal general computing devices. A more powerful CPU was great, but that didn't mean it had to be treated like a desktop.

IMO they lost sight of that niche. RPi4 never debuted at $35, so if you can get one for that I'm surprised. That's mostly because it's old stock they're trying to get rid of at this point if so. It pretty much was the one that pushed the baseline up to where it is, though the RPi5 certainly took that a lot further. You definitely won't be buying a RPi5 at $35 any time soon...

The Zeros may be the closest to filling that old niche, but they also have more limitations to their bigger brothers

@nazokiyoubinbou The Pi4 1GB is literally $35, right on their website:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/

And in my town I can pick it up for 39 EUR, which is what I would expect with the taxes, exchange rates and other shenanigans. Not terrible for a real computer that runs Linux.