Raspberry Pi announces first-ever price hike due to component shortages

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton announced the company's first-ever price hike, all due to a global component shortage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. While the Raspberry Pi may produce up to 7 million devices this year, the same as last year, companies are buying up more components than before to ensure their products can be built. As a result, the Raspberry Pi Zero and the Raspberry Pi 4 variant with 2GB of memory are in short supply.

To address this issue, the manufacturer is bringing back the price of the Raspberry Pi 4 from 2GB to $45. The model debuted at that price, but the Raspberry Pi dropped it to $35 in 2020 to replace its 1GB counterpart, which was discontinued. Upton said rising prices for the components needed to make the boards means that selling the 2GB Pi 4 for $35 is no longer economically feasible, so the company is temporarily bringing back the old price. It's also offering the 1GB option again for $35 to give buyers another option to choose from. 

In its announcement, Upton explained that the problem will affect products built on 40nm silicon the most. Because the company needs to allocate components intelligently, it has decided to prioritize Compute Module 3, Compute Module 3+ and Raspberry Pi 3B, and cancel the Raspberry Pi 3B+. The company is now encouraging industrial users of the Raspberry Pi 3B+ to use the Raspberry Pi 4 variant with 1GB of memory instead.

The CEO said these changes are temporary and that pricing changes will not be long in coming. "As global supply chain issues diminish, we will continue to look at this issue and we want to get pricing back up to par as quickly as we can," he wrote. However, the company expects supply chain issues to persist through 2022. 

Source: engadget, raspberrypi

Illustration: raspberrypi