Raspberry Pi slices Compute Module 4 prices Raspberry Pi has bucked tech industry trends and cut prices for the 4 GB and 8 GB variants of its Compute Module 4. The Compute Module 4 (CM4) debuted in 2020 and was a departure from the DDR2 SODIMM form factor that had gone before it. Earlier this year, a fully loaded variant with 8 GB RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage could be …
Or to put it another way (and realising that Pis are actually priced in $, so the exchange rate has some bearing on this), the Bank of England inflation calculator reckons that £30* in 2012 is worth about £42.50 in 2025. You can buy a 2GB Pi 4 for around about that figure these days** which gives you (against the original Pi 1B):
To be fair, some of those improvements came with the Pi 2 and Pi 3, but even so it's an impressive list.
For those complaining about the fact that the most expensive Pi is now well over £100, horses for courses, innit? I have an application which ran perfectly well on the original Sony-produced, 256MB Pi Bs. In fact I still have a handful of those in service. The application runs a bit more smoothly on Pi 2 and Pi 3 hardware, but Pi 4 and 5 are complete overkill. Nevertheless, when I need new hardware, I might as well buy Pi 4 which is no more expensive in real terms than the original hardware. My children used a Pi 3 for schoolwork, including during CoViD and I have to say that while doing so took a bit of care on a Pi 3, a Pi 4 or 5 in my experience (though most of my Pis run "Lite" and headless) is perfectly good as a daily desktop machine, certainly with 4GB or more.
My one and only proper complaint? That I can't make video play fullscreen across both monitor outputs of a 4 or 5. I have a couple of applications where this is necessary and I'm having to use x86 machines for this. Quite a minor one in the grand scheme of things.
All in all, and I haven't even mentioned the work of the Foundation which is entirely funded by sales of Pi products, an outstanding achievement. Well done to all.
M.
*I seem to remember paying ~£30 for Pis in 2012, but the linked 2012 article states £23. If price is the key, you can buy a Pi Zero 2W for £17 which compute-wise is vastly more powerful (four, 64-bit, faster processors coupled to four times as much memory***), though it does lose some of the in-built ports
**the 2GB Pi5 is about £4 more
***again, the 2012 article says the Pi B will have 128MB. I think the Pi 1A was supposed to have 128MB with the B always having 256MB (it's been a while since I powered them up, but I'm pretty certain my original-batch Chinese-built Pi Bs had 256MB) but when the 1A was eventually released, it came with 256MB while the B was quickly updated to 512MB.
I picked up a pair of Pi 3B+s that were being thrown out at work, seemingly because no-one knew what they were. The performance they have for their age and specifications is generally very impressive and I'm intrigued enough to consider picking up a 4 or 5 as a tinkering thing. Probably a 5 given they're only about £5 more than the 4 from a local UK retailer with way better performance.
One of the 3B's even came with a 7" touchscreen case and has made a nice little audio player paired to my bluetooth headphones on my workbench. (Yes, I could use my phone but where's the fun in that?)
Not sure why you're getting heavily downvoted, what you said is true. The only reason to choose the Pi over something else is the GPIO these days and maybe low power draw if your solution needs to run off solar or something.
I've been using N100 based stuff for a while now for prototyping rather than Raspberry Pi boards because they are cheaper (not much cheaper, but cheaper) and a lot more powerful.
For a while some N100 boards went sub £90 and there are variants of it with up to 8x 2.5G ethernet. Full fat nvme support. A much faster CPU and as much RAM as you can put it in it (typically they come with 8GB minimum). You can run Proxmox on them and the I/O throughput is insane for the price.
When the GMKTec G3 dropped sub £100, I bought a handful of them...and they've all been absolutely solid...they even come in a case with high quality cooling and you can run them off USB-C if you like (with a small modification).
For a few tenners more, you can get a Ryzen mini PC now with 8 cores and 16 threads.
The Pi is now the thing you choose for specific use cases, it's not the bang for buck it once was...at least for me.
I still have tons of Raspberry Pi boards knocking about (mostly Pi 3, but quite a few Pi 4 and Pi 5 devices) and I will continue to buy new Pi boards when they release, just because I like buying Raspberry Pi kit and it's a lot of fun messing around with it...but I can't call them good value and keep a straight face.
If you're companing against a NUC, you still need to provide your own keyboard, mouse, display, RAM, and storage. The only difference is you will have to buy a power supply and a case (if you want).
If you're comparing against other ARM SBCs, no other has the software support the Pi has. Other boards will probably be stuck on one version or Linux and/or you'll be hacking drivers for it to work.
I'm not comparing against a NUC. Those are expensive. I'm comparing against N100 Mini PCs.
Which you can currently find, if you're willing to wait about 5 days for the shipping, for about £99. That's one of the pricier ones, but you can find different variants for a little bit cheaper (which also have less features)
Included in that is a 256GB NVME and 8GB RAM (the bunch I bought came with Crucial RAM and Lexar SSDs) and they have full 2.5G Ethernet. 4x USB 3.2 gen 1 sockets and a 3.5mm headphone jack (depending on the model you buy).
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008473642669.html
A Pi5 (with 8GB RAM and no NVME) costs about £80.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Raspberry-Pi-SC1112-5-8GB/dp/B0CK2FCG1K
If you want to add an nvme to it (which you probably do for performance) then you need an extra board...price varies here, but anywhere from around £15 for a basic one (which is probably incompatible with most cases, so you'll be paying £20 or more for a case) or up to £70 for high end board with a case included.
You can barely upgrade a Pi as well...an N100, you can upgrade the RAM as far as 64GB, you usually have at least three m.2 slots (one populated with the NVME that comes with it, and one populated with wifi, which you can swap out if you wish)...all of which are full speed gen 4 slots. Not quasi gen 3 slots.
Keyboard and mouse is neither here nor there these days, same with a screen. I mostly use SBCs / N100s headless anyway...I suspect most serious projects do.
You have to buy those regardless. So the cost cancels out on both sides.
You cannot deny the value of an N100 mini PC compared to a Pi (or any other SBC for that matter).
Occasionally you can find some SBCs that are very cool and have some interesting party tricks...like the Radxa 3E...if you put a POE board on that, and 3D print a case for it, you have a pretty compelling network testing platform...an N100 isn't really practical for that use case...but a Radxa 3E is...I built one of those out to perform network audits for me. I rock up to a potential client, plug it in with their permission, and within about 3-4 minutes it rockets a report to my phone ready to be discussed in a meeting. Tells me exactly what I need to know about the LAN, whats on, what ports are open, which services are running on which box, how many active clients there are, banner grabs (where possible) etc etc plus some lightweight vulnerability scanning...an N100 can be used for this (and would be much faster) but it's a bit of a clat plugging it all in and dragging it to site. The 3E fits in your pocket and needs no external power if the client has a POE switch, or just a simple DC injector which doesn't take up a lot of space in your bag.
Or God forbid, you can buy a 2nd hand Lenovo/Dell/HP mini PC. For cca. £110 you can get a HP Prodesk 600 G4 mini with a Core i5 8500T, 16GB RAM and a 250GB NVMe SSD in my country (Hungary). My home "infrastructure" is based on a couple mini PCs like this, could not be happier with them.
I've been using N100 based stuff for a while now for prototyping rather than Raspberry Pi boards because they are cheaper (not much cheaper, but cheaper) and a lot more powerful.
Quick look around and I can't make that work at all. The cheapest n100 board I can find in the UK is about £160 and needs a case, RAM, storage and a PSU. Found one article in the US claiming $120 but not the source. The cheapest NUC I can find is also about £160 and still needs RAM and storage. The most expensive Pi5 retails for around £115 with 16GB RAM. Granted the N100-based units are a tad more powerful than the Pi but they're not "cheaper" by any stretch of the imagination.
But I'd be very interested to be pointed at evidence to the contrary - I might be in the market for some cheap, capable, compact computers very shortly and while I love the Pi (and have about 30 of them in use in various functions) there's nothing which says I have to use them, other than the fact that they are built just down the road :-)
M.
Aliexpress my friend. UK distributors mark up by 100%...you will find everything for about half the price on Aliexpress. Shipping isn't as quick, it's about 3-4 days usually, but it's the same products. I know, I know...muh warranty, muh returns...false sense of security my man...you probably wouldn't get an additional warranty from a UK supplier, it would be the same...there is a returns process, I grant you that, but in my experience, suppliers on Aliexpress are usually extremely helpful and they will usually just send you a new unit, no questions asked you won't have to send anything back.
Well the US has it's own issues right now....as for the EU...I'd imagine that's likely an error on the site...the nice thing about Aliexpress is you can usually find the same thing from lots of suppliers...because it's rare for a single device to be made in one factory...it's usually lots of smaller factories contributing to larger volume.
I firmly believe that Aliexpress is a decent platform and whilst there are rogues on there (as is the case with any platform regardless of where it is) the sheer number of decent suppliers massively outweighs them.
The proper rip off merchants are in the West...particularly the US...it makes me cringe every time I look at the Hak5 hakshop...things like the Rubber Ducky being sold for $119...that thing is just an Atmega32u4 microcontroller...which you can source yourself for peanuts...usually less than £2.
It's pretty well known in certain circles that it's possible to buy "Hak5" gear for peanuts from places like Aliexpress and just flash the Hak5 firmware to it (you don't even have to do that in most cases, because there are usually better open source projects that are compatible with a lot of Hak5 tools). There really isn't much special about Hak5 gear...but it demonstrates how fucked people are in terms of paying over the odds for what is cheap stuff simply because they didn't buy it directly from a Chinese supplier. This is also why people are laughing their tits off at the US tariffs...because it really doesn't affect China as much as people thing...because most of the markup is on the US side...and the danger is, if US "suppliers" absorb the increases it outs them for the rip off merchants that they are...because if you're bringing in loads of Atmega32u4 boards that cost about a buck each, the tariffs push the price to $2...which isn't hard to absorb if you're re-selling them with a bit of custom firmware for $119.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007708872520.html
https://www.hakshop.com/products/usb-rubber-ducky
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