It’s sad to see the one area of life that has long resisted inflation (computing) now succumb to inflationary forces. Other than emergency situations such as COVID-19, I’m used to seeing prices going down over time for computers and their components. It’s one of the rare bright spots when everything else is escalating in price, and now that’s disappearing.
I know one area of computing that has dramatically risen in price in the past 10-15 years or so is GPUs. Cards that fit into midrange today sell for prices that would've been considered ultra-highend just a few gpu generations ago. Today's highend prices for just a graphics card are higher than I've paid for entire computers in the past. It's ridiculous.
Those price increases seem pretty reasonable given the shitty situation. I bought a Jetson 8GB a few weeks ago for $350 CAD from Amazon, I just checked that same listing and it's now $430.
What surprises me the most is the 1GB option is even viable though I can imagine this will be for IoT users who shove Pi's into things doing embedded stuff where a kernel with a few user space things along with maybe a container are doing all the work.
> What surprises me the most is the 1GB option is even viable...
There are plenty of non-IoT use cases that are viable with 1GB of general-purpose compute. Hell, I rented an obscenely cheap 512MB VPS until recently, and only abandoned it because its ancient kernel version was a security risk.
Nothing wrong with this. Some applications really are compute bound and don't need much RAM, such as a homemade surveillance camera system I have, presently running on a couple of Raspi 4s. Suppose I wanted to upgrade to Raspi 5, why spend extra money on RAM that's not needed? These things run headless with the only GUI exposed via web server.
The article mentions "the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero". I feel this is rewriting history. The Raspberry Pi Zero was $5 when it was released back in 2015. It was mostly out of stock, but I did manage to get one unit at that price eventually.
Nowadays you can no longer get the Raspberrry Pi Zero for less than 12€ or so. I consider the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to be among the best values on the market and there hasn't been anything else that came close.
On the bright side, hopefully rising memory prices will give Microsoft and its ilk the kick up the pants they need to reduce memory usage in Windows et al
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 37.7 ms ] threadThere are plenty of non-IoT use cases that are viable with 1GB of general-purpose compute. Hell, I rented an obscenely cheap 512MB VPS until recently, and only abandoned it because its ancient kernel version was a security risk.
Most of my RPi tasks are not memory-bound
https://rpilocator.com/
Nowadays you can no longer get the Raspberrry Pi Zero for less than 12€ or so. I consider the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to be among the best values on the market and there hasn't been anything else that came close.