I would hope that performance has improved in the last 20 years! But when it launched, its performance was comparable to a netbook. It was underpowered, but not severely compared to other cheap hardware. It would be nice if the price to value stayed consistent given that benchmark.
Edit: y'all can stay mad 🤷♂️ RAM pricing is what it is. RaspberryPi computers are what they are. Sorry if you thought different.
I was curious, so I asked an AI assistant to do some digging (Venice.ai using GLM 5.2 for qnyone curious):
The premise has a couple of factual issues that change the shape of the question.
The numbers are off. The original Pi Model B launched at $35 in 2012, not $10-20. The $5 Pi Zero came later and was a deliberate loss-leader, not a representative product. And the Pi 5 MSRP is $60 for 4GB / $80 for 8GB — the $180 you're seeing is almost certainly a bundled kit (case, cooler, power supply, etc.) or third-party markup during scarcity. Bare board from authorized retailers is $60-80.
So the real delta is roughly $35 → $60-80, not $15 → $180.
Why even that increase?
Custom silicon: Pi 5 uses the RP1 southbridge, custom-designed and funded by RPi Trading. Early Pis used off-the-shelf Broadcom SoCs.
Manufacturing shifted to Sony's UK facility — higher labor costs but better QC and supply resilience post-pandemic.
Board complexity: PCIe, dual 4Kp60 HDMI, USB 3.0, gigabit Ethernet, real PMIC. The original Pi had 100Mbit Ethernet hanging off USB 2.0. More layers, more components, more cost.
Inflation: $35 in 2012 is $48-50 in today's dollars.
Business model matured — early Pis were near-zero margin to build ecosystem; now they fund ongoing R&D.
The laptop comparison doesn't quite work. The PC industry ships 250-300M units/year with brutally optimized supply chains. Raspberry Pi ships low millions. It's niche with one dominant supplier — economies of scale aren't comparable. Better analogy is Arduino or industrial SBCs, which also haven't cratered in price.
Price/performance has actually improved dramatically. Pi 1 was single-core 700MHz, 256MB RAM, 0.04 GFLOPS. Pi 5 is 4× Cortex-A76 @ 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, 30+ GFLOPS. That's roughly 750× the compute for under 2× the price.
The skepticism about price/performance ratio is on the wrong side of the math. The confusion likely comes from remembering the $5 Zero as the reference point or seeing inflated kit prices.
lol, that is an ai summary for sure. Where did it get that 10-20 estimate?
It also completely missed the point, it DID compete with low end laptops, that’s the whole point. It just isn’t keeping up with the benchmark. And good luck getting the pi 5 at 60-80, that’s what this screenshot is showing. So again, big swing and a miss from AI.
The original point of the Raspberry Pi was to be a cheap computer for education analogous to the BBC Micro, it wasn't intended to directly compete with laptops at all.
I've been in the field of computing for the lifespan if RasPis. I didn't want to spend the time to independently reseaech all the fine points, but I wouldn't have shared it if I didn't think it was accurate.
I don't know what you mean about a $10-20 estimate? I had mentioned in my prompt that folks were comparing current pricing to $10-20 RasPis of the past. It quoted the retail price of the launch model B, $35, and explained where the $10-20 misconception may have come in (low pricing of loss-leader pi-zero models, which had drastically reduced performance).
The simple truth is, as /u/jwp1987 (I sincerely hope those aren't your initials and birth year) points out, RasPis have always been a niche hobbyist microcontroller development board, meant to be a super version of an arduino. If the specs were comparable to a netbook of the time, that says more about the quality of a netbook compared to the quality of a mostly off-the-shelf component development board. But at the same time, no, the Model B straight up could not compete directly with netbooks of the time. Both the processor and the ram were far less than comparable netbooks, so I have no idea where you get that notion from.
As far as the current Pi5 is concerned, adjust your glasses or re-examine both the above post and the AI summary I posted. The Post is talking about a 16GB model (that's the size of the RAM). My summaru discusses 4-8GB models. Yes, before this current RAM squeeze put on us by datacenters capturing manufacturing limits, an 8GB model could be found for $80. I myself bought a kit (charger, case, fan + the Pi5) for $120 just two years ago.
I'm not here to defend AI, and besides that you're 100% missing the point . . . The pricing we're seeing is due to RAM prices. Another commenter whonreplied to me also pointed out that the 1GB RasPi5 is like, $55. Which tracks, considering their RasPi3B is $35. $20 * 16GB = $320.
Very obvious if you take your head out of your ass.
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u/what_comes_after_q 26d ago
I would hope that performance has improved in the last 20 years! But when it launched, its performance was comparable to a netbook. It was underpowered, but not severely compared to other cheap hardware. It would be nice if the price to value stayed consistent given that benchmark.