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Comment by garciasn | Hacker News Reader

Two months ago I bought a M4 Mini w/16GB and 512GB HDD for $599. Granted they're up to $799 right now, but a Rpi is now $350 when they used to be $35?

You're correct; they've jumped the shark.

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Two things to note:

1) Apple had long term contracts for memory which will run out. Afterwards it will be very interesting to see what they do.

2) RPi uses older memory that is much much more expensive to buy in the market as manufacturers have dedicated capacity to newer formats used by AI boxes for KV caches

The linked model has 16x the amount of RAM that $35 model had. You can still get a 1GB model for less than $50.

You can get an Intel N100 NUC with 16GB ram, 500GB ssd on Amazon for less though.

This is just very expensive for what it is.

These perform way better and have similar efficiency, too. Case, power supply, cooling, and storage are all included too. If you don't need GPIO then you don't need a Raspberry Pi. If you do then consider using a microcontroller (Pi Pico, ESP32, etc.) first.

If you just want a tiny desktop computer, sure. The reason to buy a Pi is for the GPIO and the well-established ecosystem.

Not really the Pi's fault - really it's AI causing the massive increase in HW prices (notably RAM in this case) that has really destroyed the market for the Pi's.

Same thing happening for servers, gaming PC's, cell phones, so on.

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