Comment by stkdump
17 days ago
Inflation adjusted the 1B (with 512MB, which was the only available variant) was slightly more expensive than the 5 with 2GB at their respective release. The price "increase" is that 4 and 8GB models are available at all and most people buy them, presumably because people actually don't care about the purchase price so much. But you still get the cheapest variant, if you really want to. Also, there are different variants of the Zero, all of which are cheaper than the 1A at release.
The power brick got more expensive due to the increased power use. Also if you want to make use of the full power, you need a cooler. But you can also do without cooler, because it just gracefully slows down when overheated.
I think the Pi drove the price of lower end computers down so far that people completely lost their sense of perspective.
> the 1B (with 512MB, which was the only available variant)
Hey now. Proud owner of a 256MB 1B here. Although they upgraded the baseline spec right after that first production run.
I was about to make a quip then I realized it’s actually somewhat of a valid point: if we’re going to inflation adjust USD purchase price, we need to inflation adjust RAM requirements. 512 MiB in 2012 went much, much further than how far 512 MiB will take you in 2024 (especially for the low-end desktop usage, rather than the embedded cli users).
While this is true... you reach a point where it's perfectly reasonable to compare a mini-pc to the higher end RPi when you consider the full cost to build with power, storage and enclosure with price/performance.