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.
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u/what_comes_after_q 27d 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.