RISC-V adoption can't happen soon enough!

Remember when a raspberry pi was meant to be a cheap computer for hobby projects? I think I paid $20 or $30 for my 2B at the height of its popularity.

The Raspberry Pi was a $35 computer when it came out.

Who the fuck would pay $300 for one?

I bought a Pi 5 for a project recently, and it just isn't worth it anymore.

The price wasn't even the part that razzed me the most, it was how utterly shit the Bluetooth signal was compounded with the fact they don't even offer a simple u.fl jack to add a better antenna. The lines are there, you can actually scrape some solder mask and mod one in, but it looks like a pain.

Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB RAM rises by $80

$40 price hike hits the Raspberry Pi 5 Compute Module (CM5) with 16 GB RAM.

You can tell you who Ebon wants to sell to and it's not tinkerers and students any more. Don't buy Raspi as an individual, you're subsidising big business.

Old laptops are way better than R pi's at this point. Saves e-waste too.

Aren’t they a publicly traded company now? Gotta keep the shareholders happy…

These weren't worth it at the $120 price point, let alone now. I'm going to be recycling older SFF PCs I guess, at the penalty of higher noise and TDP.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman recently blamed memory supply chain issues on selfish users buying up RAM to run open-source AI models locally, saying it’s “quite terrible”1 for people to have “a bunch of the world’s limited supply of [DRAM] sitting in their own computer”.

That thing that happened to that UHC CEO probably should start happening to more CEOs like Sam. Saying something like what he said should be beyond "mask-off" for anyone that has been in any way a supporter of his and OpenAI. Also fuck Jensen Huang, Samsung, Micron, SK-Hynix, and any of the other hardware companies that allowed global supplies to be made as expensive as having a car suddenly need hundreds/thousands of dollar work done.

I work on peoples' PCs and telling them that their drive or RAM has failed, and explain so many times the reason those parts cost 1/3 or more of what their entire PC cost them originally. And have to try saving any RAM I can from recycled PCs (never storage because super obvious data privacy stuff) so I can maybe help out (give to) folks that for sure aren't in a place money-wise to afford replacing it or getting a new PC. Mostly 4GB sticks here and there for DDR4 (DDR5 is still too new), and run diags to make sure they are good. But going to get harder and harder to do it if companies that will take the PCs to be handed-off to recycling start locking up those PCs to prevent helping folks out that just need their PC to last a little bit longer until they can upgrade. If I happen to be the one taking their PC to put in our recycle bin. I try to ask permission from people that are already getting a new PC or the reason for recycle is due to actual physical damage or some major failure of the motherboard. And even just ask them if they want to have the RAM out of their previous PC for later (if it is usable for whatever they get).

Raspberry pi also started including DRM in their (non-free) firmware that restricts RAM upgrades. If you upgrade the RAM the firmware will either refuse to use the additional RAM or simply refuse to boot at all.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/2026-raspberry-pi

I think the current prices warrant switching to Chinese alternatives with worse software support.