If today you decide to buy a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of RAM, we have bad news: its price in the Adafruit store is 350 dollars. In Spanish stores like Raspipc.es the price with VAT is 313.03 euros.
It is an absolutely absurd price for a miniPC with these characteristics, but the memory crisis has made us live in a world of crazy prices and absolutely strange situations. For example, what we propose here:
For the price of two Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of RAM you can buy a MacBook Neo.
Or almost. In Spain, the price of the MacBook Neo is 699 euros. In the US it is $599 without taxes, so that comparison certainly holds true there, because although it depends on the state in which you buy it, the final price is around $650. Less than two of those Adafruit Raspberry Pi 5s cost.
What is happening is amazing but very real: Raspberry Pi 5 are really striking miniPCs that anyone can use even as a desktop PC and offer surprising possibilities. But in the comparison with the MacBook Neo (or even with 700 euro Windows laptops) they lose by a landslide.
And in the MacBook Neo we have a much more “rounded” laptop as a product for the vast majority of users. Not only because it has a laptop with an enviable construction with its screen, keyboard and trackpad. It is true that the unified memory is 8 GB (the RPi 5 with 8 GB costs $200), but we are looking at a much more capable computer in terms of performance.
Source: GeekBench.
In GeekBench 6 the 16 GB RPi 5 gets 899 points in single-core and 2,144 points in multi-core. The Apple A18 Pro from the MacBook Neo gets 3,566 points in single-core and 8,646 in multi-core: It is four times more powerful in this synthetic benchmark.
It’s all a reality check.
What happened to the $25 computer promise?
Just two months ago Eben Upton, creator of the Raspberry Pi, announced the launch of a new Raspberry Pi 4 with 3 GB of RAM. Under other circumstances this launch would have been strange, especially considering that the Raspberry Pi 5 is available for almost two years and the original Raspberry Pi 4 were launched, attention, in 2019. Pre-pandemic.
That announcement, however, made a lot of sense because the memory crisis has caused the prices of all types of devices to increase extraordinary. Upton himself revealed that the price of the LPDDR4 RAM memory modules used in the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 had multiplied by seven. Hence the launch of an “affordable” version that at the time had a price tag of $83.75.
The rest of the Raspberry Pi models, however, were impacted by the memory crisis and the creator of these devices announced significant price increases for all of them.
Everything has meant that the company has had to betray its original objective more than ever. That $25 computer that was going to conquer the world soon made it clear that it was going to do so, but with many sacrifices: its original performance was poor, and you actually had to spend more money to use it with a monitor, mouse and keyboard (in addition to the SD/microSD, the necessary cables and the power adapter).
Over time we saw how the Raspberry Pi became a much more rounded and capable product both in its original version and in others such as the fantastic RPi 400/500. But in doing so inevitably the price also increased: in November 2022 we complained about the lack of stock and that its price It was no longer 35 euros like the original, but triple.
The firm, however, has always tried to maintain that spirit with which it was born, and in August 2024 it launched its Raspberry Pi 5 with 2 GB for $50. Today this model can be found at about 70 euros in Spanish stores, but of course, those 2 GB are not enough for that price.
The memory crisis has harmed the entire market, but it has hit especially hard with these small miniPCs. The Raspberry Pi cannot compete in price/performance with more complete devices, but They continue and will continue to be a fantastic alternative in educational environments and, of course, in the industrial field in which the RPi in its Compute Module format have managed to become in all a reference.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings