Unless you have a true, irreplaceable need for a 16GB model, everyone should just pretend they don't exist.
Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at. Now that the people who need a desktop or server have re-discovered that they're better off using an actual desktop or an actual server for their purposes, we should get back to treating these like embedded systems boards.
> because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The thing is, they are all x86. The currently available ways to get an ARM general purpose computer are... Raspberry, Raspberry clones of various degrees of shittyness, Apple's lineup and a few Chromebooks plus even rarer Windows systems that no one wants because nothing runs on them.
> Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
Oh yup... I'm running unbound (DNS resolver) at home 24/7 on a Pi 3 from 2015 since years and years. Zero issue. I run that on a Pi because that one really needs to be on 24/7 and hardly consumes any resources (I mean: it's just DNS queries). But a Pi simply ain't good for much more than that.
> I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
I fully agree. For the proper stuff I encourage anyone to buy used enterprise gear with proper RAM (i.e. ECC RAM) and a proper CPU (like a Xeon).
I've got four NUCs too but the real workhorse is a used Xeon with ECC RAM.
> The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at.
I agree. I've got like seven Pi (I was an early adopter of those) but don't ever plan to buy another.
It's like you said: they lost the plot (not just the community: those who make them too).
The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
>The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
My family (n=3) owned the Huawei P20 Pro (acquired at the same time in the same promo, perhaps the same batch?). This product line seems to have serious issues with battery swelling. Each phone had spicy pillows at some point within 2 years of ownership. Even outside the warranty period, Huawei was willing to replace the battery at their cost, at their contracted Toronto repair centre. Each of the repaired phones had their spicy pillows return within 6-9 months. Huawei was still willing to repair the phones, but at that point I'd rather have recycled it. I strongly suspect Huawei was avoiding doing a voluntary recall and triaging it through their RMA process, given how little resistance their customer support put up (they immediately sent back an RMA label without requiring any pictures).
There is Android TalkBack (for poor vision) which is available on first boot/factory reset that narrates the menu. Even with a completely broken screen you can get ADB set up.
That's very creative actually. Might be quite dated but most of the workarounds I've heard of involve plugging in a OTG cable that supports display-out and a mouse.
That reminds me how I once dropped my phone into a vat of industrial solvent; not for very long, but enough for just a drop or so to enter via the charging port. The substance gradually separated layers of the screen. Touch worked, but the big black blob in the OLED eventually overtook the entire screen. Before it went completely dark, I enabled screenshot upload (aside from camera roll) to Dropbox. Then it was just a matter of taking screenshots and measured taps to turn the phone into a very fine GSM modem/wi-fi router as I looked into getting another phone.
Rooting with a completely melted screen would be a little harder, but hey, maybe rooting could be done by following the instructions step-by-step with a little faith, and then post-root the USB might work with an external portable monitor? I'm sure it's a solvable problem.
Not in my area at least. People gut the RAM from them now to sell separately for profit, and often the HDD too for privacy, so you're basically buying a paper weight that's a motherboard in a shell.
There's laptops or X86 tablets with soldered RAM but those are rare and vanish immediately if they show up at a good price.
Sure... but... the original $35 RasPi is closer to a modern RasPi Zero 1, which looks like it's selling for $45 - $50 on Amazon.
Modern top-of-the-line RasPis seem more like ARM PCs with fast, efficient multi-core CPUs and GigE. I bought a RasPi 500 at the beginning of the year just to see what it was like and it's my new "email and light web browsing" daily-driver. Though yeah, I probably wouldn't have paid $410 for it.
I bought my original RasPi mostly for the I/O. I wanted to blink some lights, drive some servos. And if I wanted to do that again, I would probably buy a Pico or Zero.
If you need GPIO pins, ESP32 is good enough for lots of use cases. If you just need a small low-power PC, used enterprise thin clients and mini-pc's (google project tinyminimicro) offer more while still idling around 10W or less. Those can be still bought for like 40-100 USD with SSD and 8GB or more RAM included.
I think Raspberry Pi is worth it only for some niche use-cases with current prices.
RPi Foundation decided who their customers were during and after the pandemic, no doubt thanks to years of community goodwill put into an increasingly uncompetitive product, especially so now. The good thing is the world moved on, there's tons of alternatives, and you really should look elsewhere and also past SBCs for anything with that much RAM.
Presumably the only customers buying Pis right now are companies who use them in their products. There are much better options on the used market for people needing small computers/servers.
I have a little Linux box that I've been trying to use more frequently instead of my MacBook. Partially just for fun, partially because I want to decouple a little bit from the Apple ecosystem.
I was having a ton of stability issues: my filesystem would randomly go read-only after a few minutes. After trawling through my system logs, Claude suggested that it was a memory issue. I ran MemTest86 and it bailed out after 10,000 errors.
So now I was very depressed because RAM prices are sky-high and I currently cannot justify spending ~$150---more than what I paid for when I got this box used off of Ebay mind you---to replace the RAM inside.
Then I remembered my wife had an old laptop she hasn't touched in years lying around. I popped it open and, lo and behold, the RAM was compatible! I felt very fortunate that I was able to do that. Thoughts and prayers for all the folks who need memory---I've felt the despair.
You know, a RPi 5 1GB is $77, 4GB is $109, 8GB is $170 and 16GB is $385. None of it makes sense, especially if anyone starts a reballing shop.
I was looking to try out Joel's TrueNAS on ARM this time with a Pi 5, a PoE and NVMe Hat ... I decided against it and ended up getting a good old cheap x86 compact NAS instead.
ESP32 devices are still cheap enough but with a less-good ecosystems due to the Pi's popularity. I do plan on picking up a few Pi 2 Ws which are still selling at a MicroCenter near me for $18 with only three bucks of markup just for setting up a Pi-Hole and some other IoT project but yeah, looking at even the Chinese made boards like Raspberry Orange sees prices north of $70 which is just not worth it for something with this capability. At this point, why not just get a refurb'd thin client or mini-pc?
Esp32 is pretty damn powerful for the cost. We have one driving a display and keyboard, speaking and playing synthesize sounds through attached sound chip, driving an ADC over SPI at a high rate and talking Bluetooth to an attached device and talking wifi to the cloud. On a device that costs a few bucks.
It also has twice the RAM of the original Raspberry Pi (at launch), plus WiFi, plus a lot of CPU power, and a powerful GPU, and a lot more.
I have a 16GB model and I use that much RAM for some specific development work on the Raspberry Pi platform, but now I wish they had never announced the 16GB model. It has created so many complaints from people who shouldn't and won't be buying it.
It depends a lot on your use case. For headless stuff (automation that mostly uses the GPIO, for instance, or running a few "old school" server processes), you usually don't need that much RAM. However, when used as desktop computers, 8GB becomes the bare minimum to run a modern Web browser with a few tabs...
My 4 is, but only after a good while as my home server until I bumped up against the limitations of the hardware and upgraded to a proper server. So I suppose it did its job as a home lab gateway drug.
Yeah, currently I have a 3B, 2B and an original wifi-free zero in a drawer.
The 3B was my Octoprint server for the longest time while I was testing the 4B for a product, but for reasons I don't really understand, the 3B isn't quite punchy enough for Klipper, when it fully should be; it drops connections to the printer. I think any of them may continue to have some uses but perhaps not till I move to a new place.
Haven't gone for a 5B or Zero 2W yet, don't really need to. Rather more interested in what happens with the Picos these days.
It will stop when the data center bubble bursts. Right now a small group of companies are borrowing huge amounts of money to corner the market in compute in order to use it for AI. But there's no evidence that real AI revenue (as opposed to more borrowed money) will grow fast enough for them to pay for that debt, or that profit margins will be sufficient to make it worth it over the window they need to start recouping. When that realization hits the lenders and investors and the capital spigot shuts off, prices will crash. I think it will be very similar to a precious metals run-up.
The prices are crazy, but the uncertainty makes the choices even harder. I have my eyes on a Framework laptop 13 for some time. I was considering buying it with less RAM now, and then buying more RAM later. Now what I fear is: by the time RAM prices become reasonable, we might as well be using DDR7. So, even with a custom-built desktop PC or a Framework laptop it would be a pity to have to upgrade everything. On the other hand, it may well be our new reality, so maybe better buying in into 64GB RAM now? Not even sure if my reasoning is correct.
I keep thinking that the AI gold rush is not an AI gold rush at all. It is a way to monopolize computing in 2 steps:
1) AI really does require a scaleup in compute power. In other words: you will be upgrading your hardware or use old software.
2) the AI buildout means you can't buy the hardware, you can only rent it "in the cloud".
It only works, of course, if Amazon and Google and Meta and ... keep buying for another 2-3 years but that seems to be exactly what's happening.
Worst of all: monopolies used to at least require investment. But Amazon and Google aren't investing, really. They're still net profitable companies. It's almost insulting.
As a 53 year old, I've been starting to feel like there's a very real chance I will never buy another brand new computer (for personal use), phone or gaming console in my lifetime, which would be very surprising if you told this to me ~2 years ago.
If my computer fails, I have plenty of old components from older systems that I can swap in. I also have quite a few old phones (my primary job over the past decade has been Android development, so I have older test devices that still function fine for my purposes). And consoles are just very optional (and way more costly than I am willing to pay) when they start costing $1500+.
Overall there are some positives from this, I'll be responsible for less e-waste. This is something I always tried to be cognizant of in the first place, but the economics will really force my hand even more.
Of course, things aren't all that great considering we got into this situation due to technology running in large datacenters running on lots of dirty power like methane turbines.
If you just want a computer, an Ayn Thor is +$90. It comes with 1TB of UFS 3.1 storage, not one but two fantastic OLED screens, nice joysticks, speakers, and it's much much much faster.
And it runs a fantastic CachyOS (a super tuned Arch) install, called ArmadaOS,
https://armadaos.dev/
2026 has been pretty amazing, with the slow work upstreaming Qualcomm support really building. A bunch of really great chipsets have mainline support and actually work. The Thor is a bit behind SM8550, but SM8650 and SM8750 handhelds are also available (just a bit pricier, and non-dual screen yet).
Alas most phones don't have unlockable boot loaders. I'm anti-interested in the sad experience of Android, being unable to read my own files off my device. I really want to be able to read my chrome profile data, for reasons. Absolutely no go.
He has seemingly been doing a mostly second channel stuff lately. Those rarely make the front page as they are usually just "here is a thing I personally found interesting" projects.
Most hobby use cases would be fine with the 1GB, 4GB, or even 8GB versions.
I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at. Now that the people who need a desktop or server have re-discovered that they're better off using an actual desktop or an actual server for their purposes, we should get back to treating these like embedded systems boards.
The thing is, they are all x86. The currently available ways to get an ARM general purpose computer are... Raspberry, Raspberry clones of various degrees of shittyness, Apple's lineup and a few Chromebooks plus even rarer Windows systems that no one wants because nothing runs on them.
Oh yup... I'm running unbound (DNS resolver) at home 24/7 on a Pi 3 from 2015 since years and years. Zero issue. I run that on a Pi because that one really needs to be on 24/7 and hardly consumes any resources (I mean: it's just DNS queries). But a Pi simply ain't good for much more than that.
> I thought we all established long ago that trying to use a Raspberry Pi like a computer or laptop replacement was not a good idea, because every past Rapsberry Pi thread has been inundated with comments encouraging everyone to get a NUC or a used computer instead.
I fully agree. For the proper stuff I encourage anyone to buy used enterprise gear with proper RAM (i.e. ECC RAM) and a proper CPU (like a Xeon).
I've got four NUCs too but the real workhorse is a used Xeon with ECC RAM.
> The Raspberry Pi is great if you need what it offers, but at some point the mainstream Raspberry Pi community lost the plot and started treating them like laptop, desktop, or server replacements, which they were never great at.
I agree. I've got like seven Pi (I was an early adopter of those) but don't ever plan to buy another.
It's like you said: they lost the plot (not just the community: those who make them too).
For example I got several broken screen Huawei P20s from 2018, they were 10€ each. 128GB storage with 4GB RAM https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_p20-9107.php
They boot up, you can install termux and then whatever is your choice of Linux software. I run several copyparty instances for friends and family
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/
https://github.com/9001/copyparty
The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
>The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.
My family (n=3) owned the Huawei P20 Pro (acquired at the same time in the same promo, perhaps the same batch?). This product line seems to have serious issues with battery swelling. Each phone had spicy pillows at some point within 2 years of ownership. Even outside the warranty period, Huawei was willing to replace the battery at their cost, at their contracted Toronto repair centre. Each of the repaired phones had their spicy pillows return within 6-9 months. Huawei was still willing to repair the phones, but at that point I'd rather have recycled it. I strongly suspect Huawei was avoiding doing a voluntary recall and triaging it through their RMA process, given how little resistance their customer support put up (they immediately sent back an RMA label without requiring any pictures).
Slightly more expensive but you won't have to deal with battery health and the new ones come with a 1GB NIC and USB 3 ports!
There is Android TalkBack (for poor vision) which is available on first boot/factory reset that narrates the menu. Even with a completely broken screen you can get ADB set up.
Sometimes there are pretty good deals on laptops, especially off lease. I've seen some $400-500 w/ 32GB RAM pop up on Slickdeals every few months.
If you REALLY need GPIO then add a USB-C OTG MCU board like a ESP32, or even the ancient Arduino Uno works as USB GPIO via serial TTY on Android.
Or just use a ESP32 by itself if you don't need a full Linux OS to toggle some GPIO pins.
Rooting with a completely melted screen would be a little harder, but hey, maybe rooting could be done by following the instructions step-by-step with a little faith, and then post-root the USB might work with an external portable monitor? I'm sure it's a solvable problem.
There's laptops or X86 tablets with soldered RAM but those are rare and vanish immediately if they show up at a good price.
Modern top-of-the-line RasPis seem more like ARM PCs with fast, efficient multi-core CPUs and GigE. I bought a RasPi 500 at the beginning of the year just to see what it was like and it's my new "email and light web browsing" daily-driver. Though yeah, I probably wouldn't have paid $410 for it.
I bought my original RasPi mostly for the I/O. I wanted to blink some lights, drive some servos. And if I wanted to do that again, I would probably buy a Pico or Zero.
You want the Pi Zero 2 W, which is under $20 when it's in stock.
You also need to buy somewhere other than Amazon, which is where sellers go to unload their inventory at exorbitant prices between restocks.
Yeah, because a second-hand 13-year-old computer is gonna last quite a long time.
I think Raspberry Pi is worth it only for some niche use-cases with current prices.
ESP32 handles IO and streams data somewhere else that does any processing needed on more powerful hardware.
Most people realized that the Raspberry Pi was never a great desktop or server replacement a long time ago.
It's an embedded system and it's best when used for embedded applications.
These are still purchased and used by hobbyists, but the people who were trying to use them as servers or desktops are not the target audience.
I was having a ton of stability issues: my filesystem would randomly go read-only after a few minutes. After trawling through my system logs, Claude suggested that it was a memory issue. I ran MemTest86 and it bailed out after 10,000 errors.
So now I was very depressed because RAM prices are sky-high and I currently cannot justify spending ~$150---more than what I paid for when I got this box used off of Ebay mind you---to replace the RAM inside.
Then I remembered my wife had an old laptop she hasn't touched in years lying around. I popped it open and, lo and behold, the RAM was compatible! I felt very fortunate that I was able to do that. Thoughts and prayers for all the folks who need memory---I've felt the despair.
I was looking to try out Joel's TrueNAS on ARM this time with a Pi 5, a PoE and NVMe Hat ... I decided against it and ended up getting a good old cheap x86 compact NAS instead.
The pricing is off.
Reballing the RAM of the Raspberry Pi is blocked by its firmware:
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2380887#p2380...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49786689
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
EDIT: See also https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/raspberry-pi-ram-lock... linked under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50429356
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w/
It also has twice the RAM of the original Raspberry Pi (at launch), plus WiFi, plus a lot of CPU power, and a powerful GPU, and a lot more.
I have a 16GB model and I use that much RAM for some specific development work on the Raspberry Pi platform, but now I wish they had never announced the 16GB model. It has created so many complaints from people who shouldn't and won't be buying it.
Unfortunately there is no appetite for governments to step in.
The 3B was my Octoprint server for the longest time while I was testing the 4B for a product, but for reasons I don't really understand, the 3B isn't quite punchy enough for Klipper, when it fully should be; it drops connections to the printer. I think any of them may continue to have some uses but perhaps not till I move to a new place.
Haven't gone for a 5B or Zero 2W yet, don't really need to. Rather more interested in what happens with the Picos these days.
What on earth are these SKUs even targeting? 16GB in a raspi is nuts.
0: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inau...
The development experience of something like Android itself seems super unfriendly for beginners (as someone who is admittedly a beginner to it)
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/raspberry-pi-ram-lock...
the pi5 1GB model is now $45, so with inflation etc that's not too bad considering the feature set.
However, getting your hands on a 1GB model these days is practically impossible unless you go used.
The Foundation and the Trading Company have different goals, and the Foundation is not wedded to the Linux SBC Pi at all for this.
Physical computing education with Python is more than adequately served by the RP2040 and RP2350, and that is more or less where their focus is.
(Beyond that I think most of this is just geek whining, to be honest.)
'Our mission is to put high-performance, low-cost, general-purpose computing platforms in the hands of people and organisations all over the world,'
Hard to do that when you keep jacking the prices up.
1) AI really does require a scaleup in compute power. In other words: you will be upgrading your hardware or use old software.
2) the AI buildout means you can't buy the hardware, you can only rent it "in the cloud".
It only works, of course, if Amazon and Google and Meta and ... keep buying for another 2-3 years but that seems to be exactly what's happening.
Worst of all: monopolies used to at least require investment. But Amazon and Google aren't investing, really. They're still net profitable companies. It's almost insulting.
If my computer fails, I have plenty of old components from older systems that I can swap in. I also have quite a few old phones (my primary job over the past decade has been Android development, so I have older test devices that still function fine for my purposes). And consoles are just very optional (and way more costly than I am willing to pay) when they start costing $1500+.
Overall there are some positives from this, I'll be responsible for less e-waste. This is something I always tried to be cognizant of in the first place, but the economics will really force my hand even more.
Of course, things aren't all that great considering we got into this situation due to technology running in large datacenters running on lots of dirty power like methane turbines.
And it runs a fantastic CachyOS (a super tuned Arch) install, called ArmadaOS, https://armadaos.dev/
2026 has been pretty amazing, with the slow work upstreaming Qualcomm support really building. A bunch of really great chipsets have mainline support and actually work. The Thor is a bit behind SM8550, but SM8650 and SM8750 handhelds are also available (just a bit pricier, and non-dual screen yet).
Alas most phones don't have unlockable boot loaders. I'm anti-interested in the sad experience of Android, being unable to read my own files off my device. I really want to be able to read my chrome profile data, for reasons. Absolutely no go.
I mean, sucks to be a buyer right now but as a developer I like where things are heading :( :)