Secondly, Computing has always been subject to inflation. It cannot escape inflation. You may not notice it , perhaps due to the increase in performance but the cost of parts definitely has risen in the same tiers if you look over a long enough period to avoid pricing amortization
This is especially apparent if you’re a hardware manufacturer and have to buy the same components periodically, since the performance increase that consumers see doesn’t appear.
That's why I just buy something when I need it or when I think the price is reasonable, because nowadays, if I wait for something to get cheaper like I used to do in the 90s-00s, chances are it's gonna get even more expensive as time passes, not cheaper.
The days when you would wait 6-12 months and get the same thing for 50% off or a new thing with 50% more performance for the same price are over, when there's only one major semiconductor fab making everything, 3 RAM makers, 3 FLASH makers, 2 GPU vendors, 2 CPU vendors, controlling all supply, and I'm competing with datacenters for it.
GPU prices were horrendes when crypto happened (they migrated into a stable issue but it was still because of crypto).
DDR4 jumped because they started focusing on DDR5 before these news right now.
I could probably find more examples but hey
Seems it has been the opposite for some components like GPUs though for years (well before the AI boom)
So its technically not AI "ruining everything" here, but there was a nice, long before-time of reasonable pricing.
That sounds like a lot, and almost unbelievable, but the scales of all of this kind of sits in that space, so what do I know.
Nonetheless, where are you getting this specific number and story from? I've seen it echoed before, but no one been able to trace it to any sort of reliable source that doesn't boil down to "secret insider writing on Substack".
There are myriad other factors that go into this, especially just general inflation, which will likely fill the price gap by the time memory costs go down anyway.
I know I'm comparing apples to oranges here (new to used), but I started buying used 1L PCs instead (Lenovo thinkcentres) for about $20 the cost of a RPi 5 - but with the benefit of it actually coming with the cooling and storage it needs to run and is upgradable, plus runs Intel.
The amount of times I've had a Pi just self-destruct on me is ridiculous. They are known for melting SD cards, and just this week I had one blow the power regulator over USB power and still get hot enough in 2 minutes that it burnt me to touch it. They are considered cheap commodity computing and they aren't cheap enough for that any more.
At work we have a display with a Pi3 (not B) connected, just showing websites in rotation. Websites even with a simple animation are laggy, startup takes a few minutes.
Both of these usecases don't need more than 1 GB of ram, but I want to speed of a 4 or 5.
There are plenty of non-IoT use cases that are viable with 1GB of general-purpose compute. Hell, I rented an obscenely cheap 512MB VPS until recently, and only abandoned it because its ancient kernel version was a security risk.
Most of my RPi tasks are not memory-bound
Nowadays you can no longer get the Raspberrry Pi Zero for less than 12€ or so. I consider the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to be among the best values on the market and there hasn't been anything else that came close.
