Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkoird | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand? Should they be sold at a lower price when people are still willing to buy at the current higher price?

View on HN

It isn’t even about people willing to buy at $X. The Pi foundation has to pay for RAM like everyone else.

No. They are greedy bastards:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/raspberry-pi-ram-lock...

The article you've linked makes no claim that it has anything to do with greed any everything to do with protecting the supply chain since there is currently a large monetary incentive for people to fuck with it.

They have been struggling for years to match supply with demand, and RAM arbitrage would undermine those efforts... and the market would be flooded with flaky boards remanufactured in the cheapest possible way.

I don't follow. Assuming they're not being greedy, why would ram arbitrage be profitable enough to undermine their efforts?

It says so right in the article. People were flooding the market with cheap/counterfeit/misconfigured Raspberry Pis and the organization was on the hook for support and dealing with angry customers.

I have not seen any evidence of "flooding". Just a couple posts about it. And one of those posts was saying theirs did work with the old firmware, so for that instance the Pi folks deserve the full blame for adding a check that disabled booting.

I also don't see any mention of it in this article?

They have to plan their production in advance, with budgeting, contracts, and prices decided before the products are even manufactured. This is hard to do even when you're just trying to plan for the demands of legitimate buyers.

But every single day in the meantime, RAM prices will continue fluctuate, and arbitrage takes advantage of this. And arbitrate markets don't even necessarily track new RAM prices, if someone dumps a bunch of used LPDDR devices in China, people may harvest used memory for arbitrage.

For example, lets say they plan for how many people want to actually buy a 1GB Pi 5. Then they produce that amount. Then scalpers (hypothetically) realize they scape old RAM off discarded cable TV boxes for less than the OEM pays for new RAM. Then the legitimate 1GB Pis will be quickly scalped up off the market, and the market will be flooded with modified boards of higher capacities.

The purpose of the Pi is affordable computing for learning. That's pointless if the system is very expensive.

People are going to have to learn to program with less RAM....

one could argue America is forcing China to learn how to program better via it's GPU sanctions.

Guffaw, as if people are "learning to program" anymore.

But the USA is definitely forcing Deepseek to learn how to write leaner code! Bring it on.

well, of course people are still "learning to program" it's just everyone gets to be sitting in the chair of an academic or the start up chair, or whatever.

Since they're still improving models, they still are learning how to program, it's just a meta game now, not the specific intricacies.

the original pi launched in 2012 for like $35 I think

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.

a perfectly serviceable new rpi 3 is available for $39

So they should dissolve the organization because RAM is expensive?

Not really anymore, no.

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.)

That was the original purpose. That market hasn't been the primary audience for a very long time.

It was their stated mission, yes.

'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.

It's a matter of RAM costs, rather than profit seeking, no?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com