The 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 costs $350 — and the thread says the Pi has jumped the shark
A board that started life as a $35 hobbyist computer now lists at $350 for the 16GB model. The reason isn't greed; it's a global RAM shortage. The comments read like a wake for the cheap Pi.
Commenters point out you can buy an M4 Mac Mini or an N100 mini-PC for similar money — with more capability. One called it 'memory with a side of compute'.
The bleakest prediction: with RAM shortages and inflation, $350 might look like a good price a year from now.
"It's memory with a side of compute"
The product itself is plain enough — Adafruit lists the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 at $350.00, a quad-core Cortex-A76 at 2.4GHz with LPDDR4X-4267 memory. The story is the price, and a solo hardware founder explained why it's structured the way it is:
"This is because on a COGs basis it is memory with a side of compute." — the solo founder of ninja.ai
The cause is upstream of Raspberry Pi entirely. Memory prices spiked, and the thread expects worse before better:
"continued RAM shortages and inflation might actually mean that will have been a good price in a year's time." — ThrowawayR2
The comparison that hurts: a Mac Mini is right there
The most repeated complaint was that the Pi has priced itself into competition it loses on raw capability:
"Two months ago I bought a M4 Mini w/16GB and 512GB HDD for $599. … but a Rpi is now $350 when they used to be $35? You're correct; they've jumped the shark." — garciasn
The N100 mini-PC camp made the same case, and got the sharpest correction in the thread. The claim — "N100 mini PCs are a hundred dollars less and vastly more capable aside from GPIO." The rebuttal kept the comparison honest:
"An N100 with no RAM is $100 less, but throw in 16GB of ram and now they're $150+ more… Also you're missing the point." — happyopossum
"We've lost the plot"
The identity crisis was stated outright by more than one regular: "we've lost the plot. this is no longer a hobbyist computer." And the genuinely useful counter-argument — what the Pi still uniquely offers — came from someone running a home rack on it:
"you can throw PoE hats on them and build a whole home infrastructure system where the only thing that needs battery backup … is the main ethernet switch … 5 pis with PoE hats rack mount very cleanly in a single 1U row and passively cooled with no fan noise." — giobox
What actually changed
The Pi didn't get greedy; the memory market did. But the second-order effect is real: at $350, the board no longer wins on price, which was always half its identity. What's left is the niche the PoE-rack commenter named — GPIO, low power, silent, rack-friendly clusters — plus the genuinely cheap end of the family the thread kept pointing back to (Pi Zero, ESP32 boards) for projects that never needed 16GB in the first place. The $35 computer that taught a generation to tinker is still around. It just isn't this one.
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