Raspberry Pi Variants Are Getting More Expensive

The makers of the Raspberry Pi series of handicraft computers have announced that availability will soon improve. The delivery difficulties should be overcome in the coming months. At the same time, however, prices are rising.

The small computers from the Raspberry Pi ecosystem have hardly been available to many end users since the beginning of the year. In addition to a reorientation of the commercial arm of the Raspberry Pi Foundation towards larger customers and away from the market of private end customers, the reasons for this are problems in the supply chain due to the poor availability of certain components.

However, the team has now announced that the hardware bottlenecks will soon come to an end. On the one hand, “slightly more than 100,000 units” have been planned for the sale of individual products in order to meet the demand in the Christmas business. On the other hand, availability should return to the same level as before the start of the coronavirus pandemic by the second quarter of 2023.

Delivery will be better by mid-2023

From the second half of 2023, it will probably no longer be a problem to purchase Raspberry Pi branded products from the online shops of the various sales partners. At the same time, however, interested customers must be prepared to pay more for a Raspberry Pi in the future.

Because the prices of the components have risen, the finished products are also becoming more expensive. An example of this trend is the Raspberry Pi Zero W, which will be around 50 percent more expensive and will therefore cost $15 instead of the previous ten, and the Raspberry Pi Zero without WLAN support, the price of which will double from five to ten dollars.

The price development and poor availability ensure that alternative single-board or tinkerer computers are becoming more attractive. With companies like Pine64 and products like the Orange Pi or the Banana Pi, there are now a large number of similar providers and offers. A big advantage remains the large and active community around the Raspberry Pi and its various variants.