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Comment by aynyc | Hacker News Reader

I don't really blame them, but my question is, if ram price goes down, will RPI drop its prices? My experience with other companies is no.

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Price is an optimization problem, if you raise prices and profits increase, your product was likley too cheap. If you raise prices and profits decrease ("lol I'm not paying $XYZ for an rpi when the clone is $ABC") you are charging too much.

There are myriad other factors that go into this, especially just general inflation, which will likely fill the price gap by the time memory costs go down anyway.

In my opinion rpis have been living off their name/first to market for a long time now with exaggerated low-power usage, and there may come a point where your "too high" scenario happens.

I know I'm comparing apples to oranges here (new to used), but I started buying used 1L PCs instead (Lenovo thinkcentres) for about $20 the cost of a RPi 5 - but with the benefit of it actually coming with the cooling and storage it needs to run and is upgradable, plus runs Intel.

The amount of times I've had a Pi just self-destruct on me is ridiculous. They are known for melting SD cards, and just this week I had one blow the power regulator over USB power and still get hot enough in 2 minutes that it burnt me to touch it. They are considered cheap commodity computing and they aren't cheap enough for that any more.

These scenarios end up being testers to see what people will pay. If people are buying your product at a ridiculous price, why drop it?

They will if they have competitors who undercut them. Otherwise, no.

Of course not

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