Once a $35 computer, the 2 GB Raspberry Pi 4 now costs $67.50 Raspberry Pi has raised prices for the 2 GB Pi 4 and Pi 5, citing rapidly rising memory costs. Both models now cost $12.50 more, taking the 2 GB Pi 4 to $67.50 and the equivalent Pi 5 to $77.50. Readers with long memories may recall the $35 Pi 4. Its price "temporarily" rose to $45 during the pandemic and has since climbed …
But in the (my!) embedded world, most things I want to do, as a hobbyist, are more easily done with an ESP32. I think the last Pi I bought was three years ago and it's still in it's box. Sure, an HD display is needed for some things, and gigabyte quantities of storage for others. However web sockets and networked storage usually suffice, when a small TFT or SD card is not enough.
Different things. Pis and ESP32 aren't really any similar than beer and milk.
Raspberry Pi do make the Pico boards and loads of other companies make boards using the same microcontroller chip and these are closer to ESP32.
Meanwhile the original Pi B was $35 in 2012 (equivalent to $50 today), had 256MB RAM, single core, 2 USB, no BLuetooth, no WiFi.
The Pi 4 with 1GB RAM, 4 cores, 4 USB, Bluetooth and USB is today, $35. But some people will still try to stir it.
> the original Pi B was $35 in 2012
I know, I have one. Though IIRC the price was significantly more than the marketing headline suggested. Just as the pi4 1gb isn't actually $35 to ordinary buyers. More like twice that even without all the gubbins needed to make use of it.
I also have many others of various models and configuration.
But you must remember the qualification I made regarding what I use devices for. If the ESP32 had been available then (it didn't arrive for another two years) then I feel the Pi range would not have built the lead it had. A lead that it's real-world price increases are quickly eroding
> But you must remember the qualification I made regarding what I use devices for.
Namely
>> But in the (my!) embedded world, most things I want to do, as a hobbyist, are more easily done with an ESP32 ... web sockets and networked storage usually suffice, when a small TFT or SD card is not enough.
The important thing for you appears to be the web sockets/networking (which is not something that every embedded project needs, by a long chalk, or you would not need the ESP32 in particular; in fact, it sounds like WiFi is really your requirement, as *that* is really the defining characteristic on the ESP32 over any of the other microcontrollers available prior to it, which could be used with a wired LAN adapter ).
In which case,
> If the ESP32 had been available then (it didn't arrive for another two years) then I feel the Pi range would not have built the lead it had.
But the ESP8266 was providing WiFi in 2014 whilst the first WiFi R'Pi was in 2016 and plenty of ESP8266 projects did Good Stuff before its big brother, the ESP32, came out. Even today, when people are asking why such-and-such a gadget doesn't have the biggest/bestest/most expensive ESP32 in it, you see so many, many projects that could quite easily run on an ESP8266.
IOW for the "microcontroller with WiFi" brigade the ESP family had a two year lead on the R'Pi. And before that, if a microcontroller with LAN was all you needed, those also existed before the R'Pi.
If the R'Pi was really going to lose out to microcontrollers like the ESP32 it would have been struggling way harder from day 1, going up against all the very capable MCUs that predate the ESP32. But it didn't, because it wasn't. The R'Pi has capable GPIO and in that sense it is comparable to microcontroller boards, but it's USP was, from Day One, to provide access to the GPIO, and every other part of itself, in a far friendlier manner than any MCU dev board. In particular, via the use of Python (which is *why* it is called "Pi"!) (and with a GUI desktop).
And in that respect, the R'Pi had a 7-plus year lead on the MCUs: MicroPython only appeared in 2013 and took a while after that to become widespread (and even now, on MCUs that support MicroPython, or the CircuitPython fork, many still use the unfriendly compiled language approach, because MicroPython does eat up a fair amount of resources that could be put to better use on devices with orders of magnitude lass RAM than the most meagre R'Pi).
Really, the R'Pi and MCUs are not in conflict with each other. Yes, there are projects done with an R'Pi that you say could just as well be done with a cheaper MCU dev board (ESP32 or SAMD or even ATMega). But there are MCU projects that could be done with a 555 (to use the classic Hackaday retort).
Maybe, with the maturity of MicroPython, including PC-hosted editors/IDEs, and the easy availability of MCUs that are vastly larger than the original IBM PCs, and the supply difficulties getting hold of R'Pis, more people are giving MCUs a go when previously they would have just gone for the R'Pi. Good. Don't let the AI-induced scarcity stop the hacking. But that is only "eroding the Pi's lead" in one, albeit great fun, segment. There are still plenty of areas people use the R'Pi where even the beefy ESP32-S3 with 16MB flash and 8MB RAM can not follow. Even ones that aren't just wordprocessing (yawn).
(BTW for clarity, I own a fair few R'Pis but, in all honesty, don't do use them for any of my own stuff: everything on them was someone else's project and I just grabbed a copy (e.g. PiHole). OTOH I have loads and loads of MCU boards and gadgets, mainly RP2040/2350 or ESP32 variants, that I code on (and, yes, do run other people's stuff on: WLED FTW). Plain old MCUs just seem so much easier to work with than R'Pi for blinky lights. Or anything that is small battery-powered and needs good sleep states with interrupt wakeups. Or real time control.)
Very very true. I use both. For stuff I want to boot fast, run rock stable timing, don't need much memory, the pico is great. It will do wifi too. Conversely, if I want to be able to log in to the widget, make changes to it, need log files, pi or some other real microprocessor is the way to go. In a couple cases, I've done both, a pico paired with a pi. The pico handles the rock stable timing part and the pi lets me log in. Power on the pico is also a fraction of the pi.
The latest thing I've started to do is pair a little bit of EEROM with the pico so that via wifi I can update parameters. Needing to pull a unit to reflash just to change some limits or control variables is a pain. So now I've started to add some code to the pico which receives messages to update the EEROM with new settings. Still have to do a pull/reflash if I want to change the algorithm. So much easier with a pi where you just login, edit, recompile and restart the program.
I am planning a project where I need a Pi. I've not got the money to buy one (IF you can find one), so all I have to hand is a Raspberry Pi Zero v1.2 and I'll make up the rest with a Pico board.
That Zero though has sat around for years, and it occurred to me that this is the Pi I got on the cover of MagPi magazine 10 years ago, for £4.99.
It was amazing that you could buy a full computer (practically) on the cover of a magazine. Now? It's awful.
I suspect the RPi customers that are feeling the pinch are those small shops that settled on the RPi family for small runs of bespoke (custom) products.
For fairly basic applications moving backwards to older Pi models with less ram might be help them preserve their margins and their development investments. For applications that need an 8Gb Pi5 you are knocking up against low end PC hardware.
"We do not have line of sight…" — the ducks blocking the view ?
An 8GB Pi 5 has gone up by $50. From $80 to $130.
The Pi5 will be a component in a product that is likely much more expensive than the Pi itself. So a $50 increase in the price due to the RAM shortage on a $500 thing is easier to get away with than on the naked Pi device. 10% vs ~65%. Less impact for 4GB version of course. Which is why they are still selling as fast as they are made.
I am very lucky that due to several at the time planned and now ongoing projects as well as a couple still in the planning stages I bought over a ~2 year time span four Pi 5s with 2 GiB, 4 GiB and 16 GiB RAM well before the current unprecedented rise in prices. I already had a few Pi 4s and Pi 3s as well as a few of the very old others. Still trying to figure out if there is anything I can do with the 1's and 2's. However there are a couple of PC based server projects that I have had to seriously scale back on due to fast rising prices on all the major storage components. I don't see how I can proceed on any new projects that require Linux level support and new resources for the foreseeable future.
The current AI overbuild with a majority of the supplies and their prices locked up for years for the builds are entirely responsible for large price increases in ALL products that use DDRn RAM, Solid State Drives, hard drives, graphics cards (double whammy for consumers there) and networking equipment. All PC manufacturers, SBC manufacturers, motherboard manufacturers, LCD monitors and intelligent LCD TV manufacturers, Cell phone manufacturers, indeed most companies that have just a few of those components somewhere in their supply chain are currently facing a serious if not existential threat to their companies. While there are some very promising applications for AI (FU Trump) they require no where near the capacity being built now much less the massive increases proposed for the future but at this time I see few indications that the build out will slow down any time soon. One possible brake on that growth is the rising concern by many Americans with the resource and environmental impact of these huge build outs have/will have on their communities. Unfortunately they face multiple billionaires, trillion dollar companies, and a very corrupt politician and the minions in his political party may be able to hold them off until most of the damage is done or they crash and burn under their own financial weight. The latter outcome would have a secondary devastating impact on US citizens as they will once again be "required" to bail out the people and companies with almost all of the money to the tune of hundreds of billions to trillions of their tax dollars. Damn, the AI (...) apocalypse now being bandied about almost sounds like a reasonable third alternative.
And every other computer customer.
I find it really weird that the R'Pi is singled out for such special opprobrium when all that is happening is that the manufacturer is reacting to the same supply issues as everyone else.
> Its price "temporarily" rose to $45 during the pandemic and has since climbed further.
Well, gee, Mr MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM REPORTER didn't you hear, there was a worldwide chip supply problem at the time and all the computer prices rose. And stayed up as the shortages dragged on longer than the pandemic.
> Its advice to customers facing higher prices is to consider older models, such as the Pi 3B, 3A+, or 3B+
I.e. the smaller models that are still in production. Not least because they are a much more sensible model to use for for many a use case (e.g. they draw way less power and run cool: the 3B+ is the bees knees).
> and check how much RAM their projects actually need
Which is exactly the same situation as everyone else is in.
Oh, except that if you are running Windows then its bloat is as out of control as ever and you need to have excessive amounts of RAM just to boot the bleeping OS. R'Pi still support the model 3's. And the Zeroes. But if you have a PC only large enough to manage XP, you are in for a change of lifestyle.
Just one anecdotal data point, with prices as they are, could I justify buying a nice new R'Pi 5? Nope. And could I justify buying any new PC? No, nope, not at all, hoo boy no, uh uh, I should cocoa.
... draw way less power and run cool: the 3B+ is the bees knees.
Yes.
Purchased one when it came out: all the ports, GbE and 1Gb RAM made it quite interesting to me.
But was very disappointed when GbE ended up being a 300 Mbps GbE and only on paper at that.
Still trying to find something useful to do with it.
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A 16 GB Pi 5, for example, currently costs $305 at PiShop – a far cry from its $120 launch price in January 2025, when we wondered whether even that was a bit steep for a Pi.
I recently bought a ASUS motherboard bundle with 16GB RAM and a 4 core AMD processor + Ryzen Graphics plus two M.2 NVMe slots. I know the PC motherboard needs a PSU and has a much larger footprint but even so. I don't really see what market they are selling to with the PI5 at that price.
$305 for a Pi5 looks like they are pricing themselves out of the market.
