Okay that’s good to know. Honestly I always considered a Pi a single use, light weight device that just happens to run common ARM64. When they went for 8/16GB of RAM it felt like they were trying to turn them into mini general purpose computers.

In other words, 1G of RAM accounts for 32$?

Title is kinda misleading then. The comments prove it.

No RPI is supposed to cost me a gill or a fin though.

I bought a 16G for a project shortly after they came out on sale at Microcenter. It's sitting in a closet right now, and it makes me feel bad that it's not in use. I have Pi3Bs deployed everywhere, but no need for this monstrosity. Today.

That's kind of expensive, I bought mine for around 25-35€... (Only one with a case).

Now, my thinkcentre usff, they sometimes cost 40 to 80€...

300+? Madness.

Its not actually that crazy given this is for the 16gb model. Ram is fucked at the moment 🤷‍♂️

The real power of the Pi 5 is as is a testbed that can easily convert to the CM5.

For people using them as small computers they make no real sense though

YA THINK??

Because most AI don't really care about ethics

AI sure does accelerate the shitty downward spiral of the last 20 years of new tech simply being more bloated crap.

I hope it (society/tech) will correct itself in response and return to sane levels of memory and cpu usage.

AI is like the last third of the human centipede. No taste and always hungry for more shit to make more shit of.

Or a mini pc. 16GB RAM, 500GB NVME ~$300.

Used Mini PCs, brand name, like Lenovo tinys, are now my go to. Slightly larger, but orders of magnitude more capable, and often power sippy.

Good luck when that market gets squeezed too.

For a while there, second hand mini desktops like the Lenovo/Optiplex's could be picked up for about half the price of a new Pi5. Typically had equal RAM, loads of SSD storage and desktop class(ish) CPU perfomance, plus all the other benefits (Secureboot, x86 compatibility so you could run Windows if you wished). Only major thing missing was the GPIO connection.

But looking now the prices are increasing rapidly as they have been discovered. The cheap ones are typically striped of RAM and storage.

Power consumption.

Depending on the use case, this is solid advice. I’d suggest checking on eBay for older, used machines that that are still pretty powerful compared to a Pi and are also quite cheap.

A mini PC and an Arduino is the ticket.

I've also had good luck with Orange PIs. Just checked pricing and they've gone up but not pushing anywhere near $400. I know Banana PIs and a few others are out there but I am less familiar with those.

Or two.

Mini pc costs a grand+

It became somewhat inevitable once companies started buying mass amounts of Pis for every purpose because they were so cost-efficient.

It used to be an education nonprofit, but it effectively became an industrial SBC supplier.

By now we've learned not to buy RPi again

Learning starts long before the maxed out 16gb model

I'm currently building a passively cooled laptop Ryzen server with 32gb DDR4 RAM for less money. It is, like, TEN TIMES more powerful, and draws maybe 3x of Pi power consumption in peak loads, and is just as quiet and out of the way. Oh, and 1tb SSD is included in price calculations.

Times make us get creative with the tools we have.

Pi also wins in size, if space really is limited. But yes you're right, in many use cases an old normal computer makes more sense. Bit fewer e-trash also...

Buddy. I am running a seven camera Frigate system with a Thinkpad X230t (2012). That is the ultimate thicc-pad with a chunky rotatable,foldable touchscreen, from 2012. Obsolete, but not on eBay, Google tpu USB dongle. Total system cost to me <$300 bucks. Oh, yeah I forgot to mention it runs my Home Assistant, Lyryion music server and Tailscale. I have a sneaky suspicion that thing is going to last for a couple more decades. It is Military grade hardware. Look it up. And if you walk into my kitchen. There's a HA dashboard and control pane on it. It's a touchscreen after all. You can even click the stylus/pen out of the side if your hands are greasy. There's a recipes navigator/editor (Zim wiki) on the desktop. I don't know. I personally think it is as stylish of a kitchen appliance as you can find. I guess it depends on your sensibilities.

Agreed, at this point, they're capitalising as much as they can off of their reputation.

How big of a difference is the power draw?

it’s legitimately time to start treating the used/refurbished market as the new standard.

true

The base model of Pi5 is $45 USD.

The 16 gig Pi 5 us $385 USD.

If you are using 16 gigs, you should probably using different hardware.

Seriously what the fuck. I thought these things were $25. I haven't followed tech since last the last time I built a PC in 2022; I can't believe the chip shortage has gotten this bad. (Fucking AI)

I suspect if anyone is buying these is because of them needing to meet an existing strict spec. Not sure what that would be but it is a possibility.

And likely not that much more power usage

Seriously, these EU tariffs on imported goods piss me off so fucking much. I like some EU things (GDPR, etc), but then they also make decisions that are so fucking bad. We were already paying VAT. The new taxes basically kill hobbies for me. It is just a pro drop-shipping business BS by business majors tax.

Couldn’t they have made the board a bit bigger? Even throwing in older ram would have been a win if it meant keeping prices down and total ram size.

Yeah, I bought the original Pi 1 (B, o think?) and every version up to a 4, and one zero. I now use them for things like driving my 3d printer, pi hole etc.

I gifted my son a Pi5, and soon regretted it, as I later found out that the fuckers were not using standard USB C power, but a proprietary version of USB C. Fuck their enshitified souls.

This one was never $35. The higher compute power and 16GB onboard RAM had the base price at $120 at launch.

This isn't inflation, it's billionaire-flation.

OG only had 1G. This one at 1G is only $45.

The parts SBCs use have been hit the hardest in terms of price increases. And mini PCs aren't a good replacement for the Pi in embedded applications.

I don't know but this guy seems to understand it

https://lemmy.world/comment/26698708