[HN Gopher] Raspberry Pi and mini PC home lab prices hit parity ...
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Raspberry Pi and mini PC home lab prices hit parity as DRAM costs
skyrocket
Author : speckx
Score : 82 points
Date : 2026-01-06 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| spwa4 wrote:
| ... for the worst possible imaginable reason, a massive price
| rise for _both_ Raspberry Pi and mini pcs.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| AI is an impressive technology, but because its turned into a
| Space Race we're getting into some wild territory. Sam Altman who
| has been notorious for being quite the con artist is at the helm
| of this. I heard a friend suggest that the real AI bubble starts
| with Sam Altman, and I'm inclined to agree. If you're unaware,
| Sam Altman has quite a crazy history, including selling a company
| with questionable MAU's for millions of dollars, which was then
| shut down because the actual MAU's was much lower than suggested.
| He also claimed to be chairman of YC with the SEC for years,
| despite never being chairman of YC. I wouldn't trust Sam Altman
| alone with my wife or kids, why should I trust him with AI?
|
| Funnily enough, Elon Musk calls him Scam Altman, have to wonder
| what Elon and others know beyond what we know about Sam Altman.
| irusensei wrote:
| Do you need anything else than scanning people eyeballs for
| supposedly UBI cryptocurrency?
| lawn wrote:
| Sam is also behind Worldcoin.
|
| He's a complete grifter.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Sam Altman is the world's second most successful liar, behind
| Elon Musk. Elon only dislikes him because he was on the other
| end for once.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Indirectly related but it's a little surprising that we haven't
| heard about price adjustments from Valve for the Steam Deck yet
| to account for the DRAM price increases.
|
| Higher DRAM prices are bound to also affect their unreleased
| devices and make them a tougher sell to buyers.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I assume they're going to sell them at a bit of a loss, but I
| do wonder too if the RAM cost will force them out of the
| project for the time being.
| iszomer wrote:
| They've already ended production for their basic 256GB LCD
| model; the 512GB OLED is now their new baseline.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| That's the steam deck, the handheld, not the minipc like
| cube they announced
| Narishma wrote:
| This discussion is about the Steam Deck.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| I don't think they'll be able to sell at a loss, because they
| are effectively selling desktop computers, not dedicated game
| consoles. It would be easy for a company to flash Windows
| onto them and deploy them in an office space, for example.
| isk517 wrote:
| Perhaps they have already secured components for the
| foreseeable future.
| prvc wrote:
| Have they announced any price from which to adjust? If not,
| then it would be unnecessary for them to announce the
| adjustment.
| mat_epice wrote:
| The Steam Deck is an established product that was first
| released in February 2022. You may be thinking of the Steam
| Machine, which indeed does not have public pricing that I'm
| aware of.
| wpm wrote:
| Price parity but not feature parity. I still struggle to find
| good use-cases for the full sized Pi that both require direct
| GPIO _and_ the increased CPU capabilities /storage speeds. For
| anything that needs GPIO, I find it much easier to just run it on
| a Zero 2W.
|
| For anything else, where I just need "small computer running
| Linux to do a thing over USB or the network", the Intel mini-PCs
| are still a better deal.
|
| 1. They are usually upgradable, either in storage, and/or RAM,
| WiFi, etc depending on which one you buy.
|
| 2. They usually have actual M.2 storage without the need for an
| add-on board.
|
| 3. More sensible board and port layouts. I _despise_ the Pi B
| form factor. Easily the worst thing about my Radxa X4 is the
| slavish "lets make it Pi B" form factor, which they didn't even
| manage to do, so any time I use it it's a port squid mess instead
| of having everything be neatly managable _and_ I don 't get to
| use any of the Pi B form-factor accessories I have anyways.
|
| 4. Can run any x86 operating system, and get installed off of a
| USB. I dual boot my Radxa X4 between Windows and Linux.
|
| 5. Typically have faster networking and definitely better
| video/NPU hardware. Intel QSV is excellent.
|
| 6. Power usage stats that are a rounding error up or down from
| what a Pi 5 could do.
|
| At this point, I'd rather the Pi Foundation really focus on the
| Pico stuff, I find it far more interesting. The compute modules
| are also pretty useful when you really want to customize the I/O.
| As the landscape changed, the full-size Pi B's just seem...left
| out. Weird boot process, weird form factor, weird Broadcom stuff,
| weird price/performance ratio, downright hostile power supply
| choices (5V5A is supported by like two special snowflake
| supplies, and guess what, the Pi Foundation sells one!), few
| upsides. Maybe if the mini-PCs prices still increase, and the Pi
| Foundation can still get away with selling 8GB Pi 5s at $100 or
| whatever, it'll make more sense.
| connorbrinton wrote:
| 100% agree on the better video hardware. I found out this
| weekend the Raspberry Pi 5 removes the dedicated video encoder
| present on the Pi 4B. I was getting 2-3 fps in OBS, which makes
| it unusable for my application. Any mini PC would do much
| better with dedicated encode capabilities.
|
| To be fair, I haven't messed around with video encoding
| settings yet. I've seen claims the Pi 5 can do 1080p60 with 50%
| of the CPU. I could trade off quality for faster encoding, but
| with a mini PC I could get high quality encoding at real-time
| speeds.
|
| I'm feeling some buyer's remorse with the Pi 5 right now...
| tonymet wrote:
| excellent points. I'd also add that at slightly higher price
| you can include embedded TPUs /NPU like RyzenAI . With all of
| the lacking features you mentioned, and the AI features in mini
| PCs, Raspberry PI seems to be many years behind.
|
| A major selling point of mini PCs is the integrated cooling
| system, so they run silent. Pi's thermals are terrible, and the
| active cooling offerings are just garbage.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I have a lot of trouble trusting pre-built mini computers from
| random manufacturers. Way too easy to slap some malware on a chip
| on the board somewhere. Maybe I just have trust issues but I
| don't really want to give anything I buy on Aliexpress network
| access.
|
| I wish these form factors were more popular with more reputable
| brands.
| reactordev wrote:
| Beelink has served me very well the last decade. I used to use
| those old Shuttle XPC's and things but Beelink has proved you
| can fit a lot of power in a puck. You can also take it apart,
| add memory, add m2 drive, whatever.
|
| Not an ad for Beelink, just saying they have some awesome
| little mini pc's that I've used for home lab clusters. Ryzen 9
| 16C+32T little beasts that are completely silent.
| mrmuagi wrote:
| Some of the recent Beelink ones have soldered ram though.
| reactordev wrote:
| [delayed]
| trvz wrote:
| The Mac mini exists. Suffering is a choice.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I've been Linux-only for over a decade, I've long since made
| that choice :)
|
| Also, the cheapest Mac Mini is $600. The Mini PCs we're
| discussing are generally sub-$200.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| And _used_ intel Mac minis are cheap and work. They 're
| pretty handy and upgradable actually.
|
| I'm tired of maker-washed overpriced slow gear that was
| supposed to be cheap, but is expensive and impossible to
| find. There are infinitely better choices than RPis. I
| recently went through having to make a custom shielded M.2
| cable (by wrapping it in aluminum foil and Kapton tape) and
| stability burn-in testing for an SBC that would otherwise
| spontaneously hang. I'm tired of craptastic SBCs.
|
| PSA: Please reuse old stuff first and stop buying new, new,
| new when alternatives exist that are suitable for a
| particular use.
| irusensei wrote:
| Pis are awesome if you have PoE+ or better. I have two pis
| one of them using the nvme+poe+ hat connected with just an
| ethernet cable. It also has serial UART port that counts as
| an offline remote access of sorts.
|
| I also just sent a Rockpro64 on a NAS case with 2x25TB
| disks overseas to my parent's home where it runs as a low
| powered backup server.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Well, if you're willing to pay a bit more, you have Asus,
| Lenovo and HP all with mini/micro form factor options. I've had
| decent experience with Minis Forum, BeeLink and GMKTek...
| though I will buy through Amazon... the returns will usually
| work better than going through some misc Ali Express seller.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It troubles me to see so many sketchy brands recommended by
| tech reviewers like LTT or ServeTheHome. It's going to be great
| when they all go rogue in the event of conflict.
| wan23 wrote:
| What's your definition of sketchy? For me I'd say by
| definition a non-sketchy brand is one that has some kind of
| social proof. The next question though is who do you trust?
| tonymet wrote:
| There have been many cases of spy chips installed on reputable
| brands. A famous case was Elemental (transcoding company,
| purchased by AWS) , where AWS discovered espionage chips
| installed while they were integrating Elemental's Supermicro-
| based units into AWS datacenter
|
| (AI summary for example)
|
| https://bytegiest2.substack.com/p/grok-breaks-down-supermicr...
|
| All of these boards are made in China, so it's no safer
| strategy to bet on name brands.
|
| Only Apple and a few other brands may have tight enough supply
| chains to guarantee BOM security.
| anthk wrote:
| Learn to live with 1GB of RAM. Either CLI/TUI tools, or software
| like Dillo or Sxiv. Mainline dillo from their Git and not the
| outdated one from the repos. The new "dilloc" it's amazing, you
| need Dillo compiled with socket control support. _Then_ you will
| be able to use dilloc as a client to spawn commands con scripts.
| For instance, to rewrite URL 's from a list. Hint: the ones from
| https://farside.link . Youtube to Invidious, X.com to Nitter and
| so on.
|
| Connect to https://farside.link, https://lite.cnn.com,
| https://text.npr.org or gopher://magical.fish as a services
| portal or news source.
|
| Use mpv+yt-dlp if you are under Unix to watch online videos.
| Complex? Just a little bit first. Incredibily rewarding later. No
| JS will be needed to play videos on most websites. Also with yt-
| dlp you are able to save them for later usage.
|
| Try programming with small languages from https://t3x.org and
| doing Math/Intro to Statistics book with Klong and its manual.
| s9fes can be a good enough Scheme Lisp to complete the exircies
| Concrete Abstractions and maybe SICP if you know how to
| reimplement (frame) and the missing functions. An easy task after
| CACS.
|
| Consider SQLite+Python+TkInter or TCK+Tk as the DDBB UI on top.
|
| Golang can be great too with 1GB of RAM and a simple n270
| netbook, I run Yggdrasil on that, and NNCP too among other tools.
| Everything with nvi as the editor (basically vi+UTF-8+some status
| line for help), simple Makefiles
| git://bitreich.org/english_knight and entr(1) as a tool to watch
| a directory and spawn 'make' on file changes.
| areoform wrote:
| If you have an Apple ][ retro emulator, what book would you
| recommend to explore programming the full stack way (as in,
| assembly language up to lisp)?
| bullen wrote:
| To write this article without mentioning the 3588, is like
| writing about Venezuela without mentioning oil.
|
| Pi 5 and N150 are completely meaningless since before they came
| into existence.
|
| Also the price of 3588 increases by batch so you can still get
| them at almost launch price (4GB was $70 now $110, next batch
| probably ~$150 by now if nothing improves)
| areoform wrote:
| Could you please provide a link? I don't know what 3588 is. It
| seems to be, Rockchip RK3588?
| bullen wrote:
| Yes, you have to google it yourself, there are too many with
| pros and cons beyond a hn comment.
| toast0 wrote:
| Google gives me this for 3588
| https://www.tractordata.com/farm-
| tractors/000/3/8/381-intern...
|
| I guess giving up a life of computing and starting a life
| of vintage tractorring is pretty compelling, but I don't
| think they're making new batches of 1981 tractors; but who
| knows what VW is up to these days.
|
| OTOH, DuckDuckGo gave me California tax forms. No thanks!
| Youden wrote:
| If you search "pi n150 3588" (without the quotes), Kagi,
| Google and DuckDuckGo all make it clear that "3588" means
| "RK3588" or "Rockchip RK3588".
|
| Back in the old days we didn't have all these AI things
| and personalization to predict our intent, we had to put
| context in our queries :)
| areoform wrote:
| Yes, but they seem to be talking about a specific
| product? "(4GB was $70 now $110, next
| batch probably ~$150 by now if nothing improves)"
|
| I think it's reasonable to ask, what's $70, now $110 and
| $150?
|
| If you're quoting specific numbers for a specific product
| that you're claiming should be in the thread and then you
| refuse to link it...
| irusensei wrote:
| Well hopefully this will help to keep the "x86 guy" from barging
| into EVERY arm sbc related conversation regardless of the
| subject. They will ignore every argument about what the
| conversation is about and point out their recycled trash Lenovo
| uses 6W on idle while conflating idle power usage with efficiency
| per watt.
|
| "Yeah dude we know but I need a Pi for this project. So sit
| down."
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