RAM Shortages Impact Raspberry Pi

Due to the current global RAM shortage, Raspberry Pi prices will go up. Prices will be correlated with how much RAM is in the model. For example, board with 2GB of RAM will go up $10 while 16GB boards will cost an extra $60. For devices that are notoriously less than $100, this is a huge deal. The 16GB Pi 5 now costs over $200, according to Ars Technica.

Because of the historically low cost and small form factor, Raspberry Pis have been immensely popular in the privacy community for a wide range of self-hosted tasks. They're popular for running single-instance Mastodon or Nextcloud servers, home DNS resolvers, and more. Your truly has used them to run Matrix moderation bots, a website to invite friends and family to a Eurovision viewing party, and more.

Sadly, like many aspects of life, this price hike will disproportionately affect people on a tight budget, making privacy and data sovereignty even more of a privilege than it already is in many cases.