DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
Rising DRAM costs are pushing Single Board Computers (SBCs) like the Raspberry Pi out of reach for hobbyists, potentially signaling a decline in the DIY tech market.
DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
Today Raspberry Pi announced more price increases for all Pis with LPDDR4 RAM, alongside a 'right-sized' 3GB RAM Pi 4 for $83.75.
The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99.
Despite today's date, this is not a joke.
I published a video going over the state of the hobbyist 'high end SBC' market (4/8/16 GB models in the current generation), which I'll embed below:
But if you'd like the tl;dr:
Unless the DRAM pricing situation changes radically, I think the hobbyist SBC market is dying—or at least on life support. And I don't just mean Raspberry Pis, but all SBC vendors. LPDDR chips now account for the majority of board cost from the vendors I've checked with.
Besides causing a radical reduction in new boards launched (Radxa seems to be the only vendor that had some cadence last year), the price increases for boards with greater than 4 GB of RAM have put those boards out of the reach of most hobbyists.
Even mini PCs, which for a time were a great deal, have risen to $250+ for 8 GB models. Used PC are also more expensive, especially with more than 4 GB of RAM.
I design most of my projects so they can be replicated for less than $100. Learning is easier on cheaper parts you won't fret over too much when you break them. With prices going up, this limits the types of projects I take on.
I'm working more with older SBCs and microcontrollers now, and I think that's the direction many in the hobbyist space are going.
Maybe, as Eben Upton says in Raspberry Pi's post,
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.
But I'm not sure how long we'll have to wait, or if a hobbyist SBC market will exist by the time the bubble bursts.
Lucky for Raspberry Pi, they have a thriving microcontroller ecosystem and industrial base to keep them going. I fear smaller vendors won't be able to go on like this forever.
Source: Hacker News
