Raspberry Pi prices jump

Raspberry Pi’s latest price jump is not a normal retail markup. It is a memory story. In early April, the company raised prices across much of its lineup again, with the biggest shock landing on the Raspberry Pi 500+, which now starts at $410. That machine launched as a premium all-in-one keyboard PC with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Now it costs more than four times as much as the original Raspberry Pi 500 that debuted at $90 in December 2024. The plain Raspberry Pi 500 is now listed from $180, up from that original $90 launch price too (raspberrypi.com, raspberrypi.com, raspberrypi.com). The reason is not mysterious, and Raspberry Pi is not pretending otherwise. Eben Upton, the company’s CEO, said in February that the price rises were being driven by an “unprecedented rise” in LPDDR4 memory costs as AI infrastructure soaked up fab capacity. He said some parts had more than doubled in cost over the prior quarter. That February round already added $10 to $60 depending on memory size. Then April brought another wave, including a reported $100 increase for the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 and a $150 increase for the 500+ (raspberrypi.com, theregister.com). That pattern tells you where the pain is concentrated. The products getting hit hardest are the ones with more RAM, because on a low-cost computer memory is a huge share of the bill of materials. IEEE Spectrum reported in February that the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 had already climbed from $120 in November 2025 to $205 by late February 2026. Upton’s explanation was blunt: if the rest of the board stays mostly the same and only memory scales up, then a memory shock lands directly on the sticker price (spectrum.ieee.org, raspberrypi.com). The broader market makes that explanation hard to dismiss. TrendForce said in January that DRAM suppliers were reallocating advanced process capacity toward server DRAM and HBM to feed AI server demand, and forecast conventional DRAM contract prices rising 55 to 60 percent quarter over quarter in the first quarter of 2026. By February, that outlook had been revised even higher, with some reports citing 90 to 95 percent increases for conventional DRAM as the supply gap widened (trendforce.com, techpowerup.com). Raspberry Pi’s response has been to protect the bottom of the range where it can and squeeze the middle everywhere else. The company has kept the 1GB Raspberry Pi 4 at $35 and the 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 at $45, and said Raspberry Pi 400 and older LPDDR2-based products were unaffected because it holds years of inventory for those chips. At the same time, it introduced a strange new compromise product: a 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 for $83.75. A year ago that would have sounded absurd. In 2026 it is what a company does when memory prices are setting the rules (raspberrypi.com, theregister.com). That is why the Raspberry Pi 500+ price is the detail that sticks. It is not just an expensive hobby board. It is a compact Linux PC in a keyboard, with 16GB of LPDDR4X and a 256GB NVMe drive, now listed at $410 on Raspberry Pi’s own store. The machine still has the same 2.4GHz quad-core Cortex-A76 processor, the same dual 4K display support, the same GPIO header, and the same sales pitch. What changed was the cost of memory, and that was enough to turn a product line built around affordability into one where even the “available from” price now reads like a warning label (raspberrypi.com, raspberrypi.com).