The Raspberry Pi is about to turn eight, having officially launched on February 29, 2012. To celebrate, the Raspberry Pi foundation is permanently lowering the price of a 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 B to $35, down from its usual list price of $45.
The latest and greatest version of the popular single board computer, the Raspberry Pi 4 B is available with three different memory capacities: 1GB, 2GB and 4GB. The 4GB model continues to cost $55, while the 1GB model is effectively discontinued, though the foundation will still manufacture that capacity and sell it to industrial clients for the same $35 as its higher-capacity sibling.
In a blog post on the Raspberry Pi foundation website, CEO and Founder Eben Upton credited lower RAM prices with the decreased cost. Upton also noted that the $35 price point is the same as the original Raspberry Pi which launched in 2012. When you consider that, due to inflation, $35 from 2012 is equivalent to $40 in 2020, the price of a Pi has gone down.
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Today’s Raspberry Pi 4 is also 40 times faster than the original model from 2012, which had a 700 MHz ARM1176JZF-S processor as compared to the 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53, quad-core CPU in the current generation. The 2GB Pi 4 has eight times as much RAM as the original Raspberry Pi.
In the past eight years, Raspberry Pi has sold more than 30 million units. When it launched last June, the Raspberry Pi 4 was the first model to offer RAM capacities greater than 1GB. Now, with the 2GB capacity becoming the base model, it looks like 1GB is mostly a thing of the past. People continue to buy older-model Raspberry Pi 3 models that have 1GB and the tiny, super-cheap Raspberry Pi Zero and Zero W sport only 512MB of RAM.
If you don’t have a Raspberry Pi in your life already, check our story on why every geek should own a Raspberry Pi. We’ve also got a complete guide on how to set up a Raspberry Pi.
