[throwaway81523]

This isn't exactly news, that model has been at $350 for a while.

It's not like RPi suddenly introduced a 16GB model at a ridiculous price due to having forgotten about low cost stuff. The 16GB model was originally $85 iirc. Then the memory shortage hit. They could either withdraw the 16GB model (maybe screwing over some people who absolutely had to have it) or raise the price for those with urgent enough requirements. They did the latter.

Me, I'd like to see some large MCU's (let's say a little above RP2350 / ESP32 level) with a few MB of memory, but with memory protection, like old fashioned Vaxes with that much memory. That would allow running multiprocessing OS's where the processes couldn't easily clobber each other like on the current stuff. Many programs don't require GB's of ram.

[scheme271]

I don't think they can withdraw a model easily, they also supply Pis to industrial markets and they probably have contracts that guarantee supply for a given time period.

[geerlingguy]

16GB was $120 at launch. Even at that price it was a stretch and really only useful in some niches. The 4 or 8 GB models were always the best value. Now those are a bit too much, for what you get.

I still think there are good applications for the <4 GB Pi 5s, but for a lot of projects I just stick with a Pi 4 or CM4 now.

[throwaway81523]

Ah ok, $120, then $85 may have been the 8GB version. I remember being annoyed that to get the NVMe slot in the 500, I would have had to buy the 500+ with 16GB of ram and the mechanical keyboard, neither of which I wanted. It was at the time around $200 while an 8GB regular 500 was maybe half that.

It looks like a pi 5 is $10 more than a pi 4 in most (all?) sizes. Seems worth it for the NVMe slot by itself. SD cards are awful. I'm not buying until the ram situation settles though. I have a 400 (4gb pi 4 in a keyboard) that I use for some things.