2GB Pi5 - $50 16GB Pi5 - $120
I can see the uses of having more RAM, but surely it's cheap enough to make 4GB standard, with options for 8/16GB that are sensibly priced - removing one SKU.
Looking at Micron's range, they now have a 128Gb (16GB) chip with matching specs, which is the MT53E4G32D8CY-046 WT:C. That chip costs £74.66 per chip from Mouser Electronics (just one site I found selling it) in quantities of 1,360.
In contrast the 2GB chip - which I surmise is a MT53E512M32D1ZW-046 - costs £9.26 each in quantities of 250. There's a price break listed for 2,720 of the things, but I'm not going to ask for a quote.
So that's £65.40 more for the larger RAM chip. Which is about $80 on today's mid-market exchange rates.
Looking at the 4GB it's probably a MT53E1G32D2FW-046, which is £16.72 in bulk quantities of 1,360 from the same wholesaler (for the revision C part). So that's an extra £7.46 or about $9.
Why are other systems' RAM upgrades cheaper? Largely because they use more chips, and therefore each chip has less capacity. That means either the chip is less dense, or it's a smaller die, so fewer defects are likely within the one chip, making yields higher. An SO-DIMM might have two or four chips on it, depending on whether it's populated on one side or both; a full-size DIMM might be 8 or 16 (or 9 or 18 if it has ECC).
Obviously I've made the assumption that this is just a drop-in replacement chip on the existing board. But I assume it would be very hard to redesign the board to fit in the same form factor, with all connectors in the same positions, but add on another RAM chip. If the SoC even supports driving more than one RAM chip, which it may not.
TL;DR that's what Micron charge for the larger chip.
If we use your prices above just as a "scale" then you can already see here that 1X 4GB part is cheaper per GB than 2GB, so as I say it's around $3 in cost to upgrade the base model from 2>4GB.
(I would even line a 32gb skew but realise that is unreasonable for the current soc)
It would cost about $3 to make the 2GB RPI5 a 4GB PI5, and you might save something close to that by removing a SKU. You then get a bunch of new applications (which need more RAM) for your SBC and your product sells more as it looks better value. On the whole that $3 is now looking like a bargin.
I don't think 32GB is needed or sensible, so will disagree there.
32GB is impossible at present. No-one makes a 256 gigabit (32x8) chip to fit in the same footprint, so then you have to do a new board design to support multiple chips, which might not be doable in the board's current footprint.
Micron do a 192 gigabit (=24GB) chip but it's LPDDR5, rather than LPDDR4x, which I imagine the RPi 5's SoC can't drive.
Even if we look at farnell for a qty of 50..
https://uk.farnell.com/micron/mt53e512m32d1zw-046-wt-b/dram-...
50 - £9.29 EX VAT
https://uk.farnell.com/micron/mt53e1g32d2fw-046-wt-a/dram-1g...
50 - £12.04 EX VAT
Those are public prices (not even account price) for buying only 50, and there's ~$3 difference even there.
I can't believe that people are still surprised about this kind of pricing, because it's completely normal pricing strategy in almost every market. If this is greed, then I guess greed is simply wanting to be able to run a viable business, and wanting as many customers as possible to be able to afford your products. It's basic price discrimination, and personally I think it's a good thing.
I suspect when you're selling at the quantities that Apple are doing, they'll have to consider the impact their RAM pricing will have on RAM shortages. If they price the highest RAM option much cheaper, everyone will just buy that option, even if they don't need it. At those volumes, that could trigger the need to build new RAM factories, which will drive up RAM prices a lot in the short term, which is rather self-defeating.
They have to make money somehow, it means selling things for more than they pay for. They chose to make higher margins on the 16GB model than on the 8GB or less models, which is not particularly shocking.
https://www.londonstockexchange.com/stock/RPI/raspberry-pi-h...
A charity can't really trade in the same way a company can. For example a charity can't register for VAT (sales tax).
The way it normally works is that a charity exists which takes donations and does charitable stuff, then a seperate company exists which makes money and sells stuff (does trade) and it happens to be run by the same folks, and donate money to the charity (or have some kind of 75% of our profits get donated to charity) promise. That's super trivial to unwind as the charity often has no formal ownership over the trading company, it is really just a beneficiary.
On the grapevine, they had more money than they knew how to get rid of in accordance with their very narrow charitable objectives.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/21/captain-tom-...
Captain tom was just a badly run charity, they didn't trade.
But I think a charity should spend most of its income on charitable activities. According to its accounts the Foundation spends £12m on that out of a £213m income from trading, which seems very small.
The commercial subsidiary is a publicly-traded company and the Foundation (the charity) owns about 49% of it (last year it wasn't publicly traded and they owed ~98% of it iirc). The Foundation received £213m from "other trading activities" last year (which I interpret as income from their share of the commercial subsidiary) out of a total income of £220m. Out of this, the Foundation spent £12m on "charitable activities" and £195m on "raising funds"... [1]
[1] https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...
However given the cost of RAM is quite cheap, sales are slower after the initial Pi5 rush and there are a number of competitors would it have been much better for the company to say
4GB is entry level for $50, 8GB for $65, 16GB for $95
Would they have sold more units? Improved the range of software that can run on a RPI, increasing demand further?
Anyone who knows what they're doing is capable of using a cheaper Allwinner or Rockchip SBC or flashing a supported Android TV to Linux because SBCs are for some reason pricier than the same SoC that comes with a plastic box and power brick.. or even (gasp) to run their blinky LED off a $3 Aliexpress ESP32 board.
(EDIT: yes i get that for the mac mini the ram is getting doubled, but here the memory increase is also similar in amount).
i recognize the new memory chip SKU that made it possible, but you need a lot of mental gymnastics before justifying the compromise.