Re: Relentless price increases are not obligatory
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):
- four 64-bit cores instead of one 32-bit
- each core running at more than twice the clock rate
- eight times as much RAM
- two 4k HDMI outputs instead of one HD, and an upgraded video processor
- "real" USB3 instead of a hacked-together solution using USB2 OTG
- (near) gigabit ethernet instead of 100Mbit
- 5GHz and 2.4GHz WiFi with Bluetooth instead of no wireless at all
- the 40-pin GPIO header instead of 26-pin meaning more connections for projects
- far less propensity to brick SD cards when power is removed without shutting down
- and probably loads more things I've forgotten
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.