Raspberry Pi Sees Their First Price Increase Due To Supply Chain issues

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi Sees Their First Price Increase Due To Supply Chain issues

The ongoing supply chain issues across the semiconductor industry (and more broadly) are now impacting the Raspberry Pi operations for end-users/customers when it comes to pricing...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi-Supply-Chain

[coder]

Funny enough, I was just wondering about this, a couple days ago.

[tildearrow]

Pandemic
Miners
Apple

[brent]

There's also inflation to consider, Raspberry Pi was first released over 9 years ago and the price of the base model was never updated.

[coder]

Pandemic
Miners
Apple

Only one of those really fits.

Pi v4 is made on 28 nm manufacturing technology. Miners are using stuff fabbed on 16 nm and below (mostly 12 nm, 8 nm, and 7 nm, I'm sure). Apple is already on 5 nm, and buying up capacity on 3 nm.

Now, there are two ways miners and Apple can indirectly influence availability of 28 nm. The first is by delaying other chips' transitions to smaller nodes, perhaps keeping some products on 28 nm longer than intended. That probably happens, but maybe not much? But the more serious impact is going to be competition for certain raw materials and other inputs. The current substrate shortage is one example of this.

Still, Pandemic gets the lion's share of the blame.

[darkbasic]

There's also inflation to consider, Raspberry Pi was first released over 9 years ago and the price of the base model was never updated.

The economies of scale that they developed since then more than accounted for inflation.

[perpetually high]

The economies of scale that they developed since then more than accounted for inflation.

That’s a fair point. But they’ve also been upping the specs considerably since they first launched.

I think the manner in which they are doing it (reintroducing 1GB, charging $10 more for the 2GB) is pretty reasonable and they have such a strong following that I don’t think many will mind. (As long as it is hopefully temporary).

I still have my original Pi (2011.12, Model B, revision 2.0) which has 512MB and runs flawlessly currently as a pi-hole/pivpn, you name it. That thing is a champion.

[Paradigm Shifter]

I still have my original Pi (2011.12, Model B, revision 2.0) which has 512MB and runs flawlessly currently as a pi-hole/pivpn, you name it. That thing is a champion.

That seemed to be the primary advantage of the Pi - it wasn't quite invulnerable (I watched someone cook one by wiring the GPIO up wrong and got a bollocking when I tried to point out before the magic smoke moment that when they applied power it was going to fry) but it was pretty close!

[M@GOid]

All kind of nodes are affected in the current scenario. Just look at the automotive industry. They are reducing production of popular models because they cannot find chips to put on those vehicles. I doubt very much things like traction control, electronic fuel injection or infotainment modules utilize advanced nodes.

Plus, is not just CPUs. Memory, connectors, SMDs, don't tell me the suppliers of those things didn't want to join the "I have supply chain issues so I have to increase my prices" bandwagon.

[rene]

told ya so :-/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imb_qbWtqew