Raspberry pi just punched makers in the wallet: 16 gb pi 5 now costs $370

Three price hikes in a matter of weeks. The 16 GB Raspberry Pi 5 now ships at $369—one hundred dollars more than yesterday. The all-in-one Pi 500+ keyboard computer? Add $150. The charity that once sold $35 boards is quietly admitting the DRAM famine is real, brutal and nowhere near over.

The numbers no one expected on april fools' day

CEO Eben Upton chose 1 April to publish the new tariffs, perhaps hoping the date would soften the sting. It didn’t. His own press note confesses that the LPDDR4 chips inside the Pi 4 and Pi 5 have become seven times more expensive since spring 2024. That is not inflation; it is a hijacking. Generative AI training clusters are gulping every last wafer of high-density memory, leaving education boards—and the kids who code on them—fighting for leftovers.

The new street prices feel obscene for a nonprofit. A 4 GB Pi 5 climbs $25, an 8 GB model $50. The freshly launched 16 GB variant lands at $369 in Spain, rubbing shoulders with entry-level Mini PCs that pack x86 CPUs and NVMe slots. The Pi 4 escapes mostly intact—except the new 3 GB version, a deliberate austerity SKU designed so schools can still buy something under $50.

Why this hurts more than your average tech tariff

Raspberry Pi’s entire value proposition was built on the promise of universal access: cheap, open, ubiquitous. When the board that taught a generation to solder suddenly costs Mac-mini money, the whole low-cost ecosystem wobbles. Hobbyists cancel cluster plans, factories rethink kiosk controllers, coding clubs rewrite grant proposals.

Arduino’s freshly teased Ventuno Q—a Qualcomm robotics board with on-device AI—already circulates in maker forums at $199. The timing is exquisite. If the Pi loses the price war, it risks losing the mindshare that made it the default answer to “What computer should I tinker with?”

Upton swears the spike is reversible. “When DRAM prices normalise, we will roll back these increases,” he writes. The pledge is almost quaint; no for-profit OEM ever volunteers to cut margins once the supply storm passes. But the Raspberry Pi Foundation has lived on thin air for years, so the promise carries weight—assuming memory markets ever cool.

Meanwhile, the message to the faithful is blunt: buy only the RAM you can justify, or sit this cycle out. The 1 GB and 2 GB SKUs remain untouched, a reminder that scarcity is now the teacher, forcing coders to optimise like it’s 1995 again.

April Fools' or not, the joke is on anyone who thought the AI boom would stay confined to data centers. It has already colonised the workbench, one overpriced chip at a time.