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  nl
  In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices:But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1 billion. Our projections are that we might drop to 800 million this year, and down to 500 or 600 million next year.We look at data points out of China from some of our analysts in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They’ve been tracking this, and they see Xiaomi and Oppo cutting low-end and mid-range smartphone volumes by half.Yes, it’s only a $150 BOM increase on a $1,000 iPhone where Apple has some larger margin. But for smaller phones, the percentage of the BOM that goes to memory and storage is much larger. And the margins are lower, so there’s less capacity to even eat the margins. And they have also generally tended not to do long-term agreements on memory.Why this is a big deal is that if smartphone volumes halve, that drop will happen in the low and mid-range, not the high end.
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  freetime2
  Just checked my Amazon history, and in late 2020 I bought two Raspberry Pi 4s with 4GB memory for ¥6,500 JPY (~$62 USD) each. At the time, they were in somewhat short supply and I payed a little over the $55 list price to buy one from a reseller on Amazon.It looks like the current price on Amazon for the Raspberry Pi 4 4G is ¥18,800 (~$117 at current rates), which is indeed expensive AF. Oddly, the Raspberry Pi 5 4G is priced about the same, at ¥18,950 (~$119).Considering inflation and the speed increases over the 4, the Raspberry Pi 5 price doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. But having the price go up well over ¥10,000 definitely takes it out of the realm of impulse buy and more into something I would only buy if I had a specific and urgent need. So I can definitely see this killing off a good chunk of the hobbyist market.As it stands, my two older Pis are currently sitting unused in a closet, so I would definitely try to use those before buying anything new.My big regret at the moment is not buying a 4TB M.2 SSD last year when prices were dipping down below ¥30,000. Now they have more than doubled to ¥65,000 or more. I had one in my cart, but decided not to buy it with the rationale that "well I still don't need the space right now, and the price per TB will probably come down even further by the time I do need it". That is, after all, the way that prices on computer component have worked for most of my life.
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  bashtoni
  Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse.I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.
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  adjejmxbdjdn
  I know this is a pipe dream (govt’s of the world working together to benefit their citizens instead of blowing some other country’s citizens up!) but if we aren’t gonna regulate AI collectively to ensure we are developing it responsibly, the least we can do is ensure AI is given bottom billing when it comes to all the resources it’s sucking up. Energy, components, engineers, construction, etc.My preference is responsible AI development which prevents it from turning into an arms race but that’s clearly not on the cards, especially with current leadership.
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  michaelt
  > The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99.Meanwhile, a refurbished corporate laptop with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD can be yours for $199 [1]I'm sure there will still be people who want the Pi 5 but at these prices, I ain't one of them.[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/327079631563
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  fidotron
  OTOH things which belong on microcontrollers are now being pushed back to microcontrollers for cost reasons, so there is a win to be found there.
• queenkjuul
  It's good that openAI is failing to meet its obligations on hardware, but given what we know about the DRAM industry, i suspect drastically higher prices will be the permanent new normal, just like most everything else.I've been having fun getting Linux 7.0 running on my Milk-V Duo S, it's still available super cheap (though tariffs make buying single quantities expensive) so i stocked up on Duo boards. I guess I'm hoping for an upside where there's more interest in cheaper overstock boards from 2022+
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  JollySharp0
  There are ups and downs in the prices of components. Often people forget that during COVID prices were high for SBCs because of supply chain issues. Video cards just were not available in the UK and afterwards (every supplier had long lead times) and are still relatively expensive (at least there are now lower priced options). Raspberry Pis you couldn't get hold of and many people (Jeff Included) was using a website checking for availability which was non-existent for anything other than low end models.I remember 15-20 years ago when hard drive prices went up through the roof because there was a flood in Thailand and it too years for prices to come down.There is going to be supply chain issues due to the current Geopolitical situation (Helium comes out of the Gulf and that is need in chip manufacture) is also going to affect the price of components.Eventually in a few years (as the article states) the situation will change. It just sucks at the moment.TBH I am more worried about my ability to fill up the tank on my car as both Petrol and Diesel is unavailable locally. I can make do with whatever computer equipment I have.
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  jonathantf2
  DRAM pricing is killing the everything market.We just had a vendor uplift our quote 50% per unit for some machines because of a mix of memory + supply chain issues.
• Waterluvian
  If I spent a bajillion dollars on massive data centres I would be delighted if personal computing were also crippled for a while. It would allow me to further own your ability to do compute tasks and to help kill the concept of doing it yourself for a while.
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  jokoon
  it's probably time to call those old retired programmers to ask them how to reduce software memory footprintor to teach that again
• didgetmaster
  How spoiled we have become...I remember my company buying RAM expansion boards for our PCs back in 1989 so we could run OS/2. The 4MB boards (MB! Not GB.) cost around $2000 at the time.Like everyone, I love getting tons of RAM or SSD storage on the cheap; but we have a ways to go before we reach the 'unaffordable' level.
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  rtpg
  am I crazy for thinking that the 16GB Pi 5 is just there to absorb money from people who purchase the most expensive version of things? Like really nobody needs that much RAM on a Pi?
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  thelastgallon
  What is SBC? Session Border Controller? Small Business Consumer?
• ValidateKorea
  Living in Korea where Samsung and SK Hynix are headquartered, the DRAM pricing situation is interesting from the supply side too. Both companies have been aggressively shifting capacity toward HBM for AI/datacenter use because the margins are 3-5x higher than commodity DDR5. The hobbyist SBC market is essentially collateral damage of the AI boom — manufacturers are rationally choosing to serve the more profitable customer.Unfortunately I don't see this reversing until HBM demand plateaus or new fabs come online, which is 2-3 years out at minimum.
• Rapzid
  High speed NVME is soaring too. Some popular Samsung kits are up 3X compared to 12 months ago.
• ghm2199
  People hate AI. This will make them hate it even more. Yet somehow the market has convinced/forced us to use their products even though we might not want to.A recent nationwide poll[1] shows AI has a poorer approval rating than ICE — ICE! — probably due to their overlords being "those" SV types. Everyday AI features are being shoved down our throats. I can't even choose to not install Gemini related apps on my Android when I select "which apps to install" when booting a new phone.But people are a weird bunch. They largely don't buy products aligning with their values. No one is jumping up and down for Graphene phones even if they had amazing privacy first software. People buy 6mi/gal hummers and iPhones for fashion, brand, money, convenience/function. The pain threshold of all bad effects still is not high enough to quit their products in a meaningful way. Values and privacy are way down in their list. I wish people would not buy/install AI related features by big tech and be more discerning, but that is likely a pipe dream.[1] https://pos.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/260072-NBC-March-...
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  Havoc
  Bought a couple of 32gb SBCs before this all hit the fan. And also built a SSD NAS before the wave hit.So timed that all pretty great. What worries me is my desktop is up for a full new buy somewhere around early '28. That could be a train wreck depending on how taiwan situation goes
• lm411
  Yep. I just bought a Pi CM5 for my son, for his ClockworkPi uConsole. CAD $200 for the 8GB module. I bought a whole Pi5 16GB not long ago for under CAD $200.I will not be buying any more SBC's at this price point. I wonder if Raspberry PI will survive.
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  jl6
  Time to break out the Small Web protocols and start living within our means!
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  fleventynine
  Most software uses 10x more memory than is necessary to solve the problem. In an ideal world, developers would stop building bloatware if their customers can't afford the DRAM.
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  Aurornis
  The extreme DRAM market has had an unexpected side effect of triggering a lot of panic buying. I know several people who delayed PC upgrades for years but then panic bought new systems in this market. The trigger was seeing all of the "It's only going to get worse" and "This is the end of personal computing" headlines.They're already regretting spending so much now that prices have started to tick downward.I keep telling everyone: If you don't have a pressing need to buy right now, please wait 6 months and check again.
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  Lwrless
  Got my RPi 5 16GB quite a while ago for around $160 and already thought that was expensive... It’s still powerful enough for almost everything I throw at it, honestly a bit overkill in most scenarios.With prices steadily going up, for me it's starting to feel more sensible to repurpose the RAM sticks I've collected from old PC builds / laptops and just throw together small amd64 boxes instead of buying more RPis.
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  esskay
  The SBC markets been on life support for a long time. Youtubers making videos about them don't seem to grasp that and keep pumping out reviews and projects like its still 2019. The pi specifically has plummeted in popularity and for most use cases they just aren't a cost effective option when second hand micro pcs are dirt cheap and vastly more capable.
• DoctorOetker
  > memory prices won’t remain at their current very high level indefinitely; the circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future they will abate.how long does it take to increase manufacturing capacity? how long will the decision be postponed to increase manufacturing capacity? if AI skeptics are right and the bubble bursts, increasing capacity inordinately will prove a big mistake. if AI skeptics are wrong delaying increase of capacity indordinately will prove a big mistake.In a sense we are forcing DRAM manufacturers to play the judge, jury and executioner:If they don't increase capacity corresponding with AI boom, the DRAM prices may ultimately cause an AI winter.If they do increase capacity (lowering per unit costs), the lower DRAM prices may enable AI summer to continue.This looks like self-fulfilling prophecy scenario.
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  culi
  Does anyone mind explaining why the 2GB model only increased by 20% in price while the 16GB model nearly tripled in price?
• rtaylorgarlock
  Am I allowed to complain about this or do I have to get my VC's approval first
• qmr
  Does this mean the Atom 8GB boxes I have laying about are now more valuable?
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  elwebmaster
  It's terrible. Fake money is fueling the exhaustion of real resources in search of questionable outcomes ("AGI"). Imagine if all of these money were invested in curing cancer.
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  observationist
  Apple and Sama didn't do the consumers any favors this year.
• roughly
  We're somehow in a race between LLMs curing cancer, destroying the planet by "You're right to be mad, I shouldn't have issued those launch codes, it's even in my Claude.md file, I'm sorry," and rendering modern technological civilization uneconomical. I know this is statistically the best time in history to live, but lord, I could use a vacation.
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  einpoklum
  The title should say: "Collusion of large corporations promoting LLMs with RAM manufacturers is killing the hobbyist SBC market (and bankrupting anybody trying to get a PC or laptop)".Because we all know that DRAM prices have spiked since production is going to those infernal chatbot training data centers. Same as a lot of the electricity in some parts of the world, BTW.
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  wpferrell
  Totally agree. Just like graphics card prices. Is it worth building a pc now?
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  contextfree
  what are the barriers to new DRAM supply coming online?
• ktokw
  It's not easy to do hobbies.. I keep needing more money..
• tonymet
  This is a good thing. Pis were priced too low for OEMs and too high for hobby work. It's no longer an accessible board for fledgling hackers . Reclaim hardware for your nephews, which is good for the environment, too.
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  Venn1
  Is there anything (technically) preventing SBC manufacturers adding SODIMM slots?I was expecting the Milk V Titan to avoid this memory nonsense since it has two unpopulated DDR4 slots, but it has fallen off the radar like several other SBCs.
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  fortran77
  My PDP-11 runs fine on 512K
• walrus01
  Unless you're really using the GPIO pins or other weird I/O, I really fail to see the purpose in having an 8GB or 16GB RAM Raspberry Pi (at a much higher price than it used to be) as a desktop workstation with a GUI on it.The idea of putting sixteen gigs of RAM in a raspberry pi is nuts. The legit thing you want to use a raspberry pi (or a competitor) for as an embedded headless thing with no KB/mouse/display attached should run fine in 2GB of RAM or less, assuming an ordinary debian-based OS environment.I would much rather have a used, ex-corporate/ex-lease, small form factor or ultra small form factor x86-64 desktop PC (Dell, HP, Lenovo, whatever) with 16GB of RAM in it and an SSD on a SATA3 or NVME interface. Whatever is the "best" SFF that you can buy via huge eBay used equipment dealers on any given month.Despite being many years old, whatever you can buy on ebay for 200 bucks (at least before the recent RAM fiasco) with some recent-ish quad core core i5/i7 or Ryzen in it will run circles around a raspberry pi 5.
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  megous
  SBCs are not just RPis. Other brands can still be bought cheaper.
• platevoltage
  It’s great that everything I love is getting ruined so that the most mediocre people on earth can generate slop on a daily basis.
• a1o
  Holy crap, it is super expensive now. I should have brought an extra one in the past.
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  dangus
  “Killing” is strong phrasing.Yes, a $250 mini PC I bought last year is now $350.Is this pricing bad? Yeah, compared to what it was.Is this the end of the world? Not really, and we’ve seen price spikes for all kinds of PC components in the past. It’s rarely permanent.
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