The Raspberry Pi Organisation has announced that it is knocking $10 off the price of the Raspberry Pi 4 2GB version. The pricing scissors have been deployed as RAM component prices drop and, nicely, a significant special date in Raspberry Pi history nears. In brief, the Raspberry Pi 4 is being sold with a permanent price cut to $35 as it reaches its 8th birthday.
Firstly, you might be confused by the new purchase options, which are listed below:
- Raspberry Pi 4 1GB, priced $35
- Raspberry Pi 4 2GB, priced $35 (was launched at $45)
- Raspberry Pi 4 4GB, priced $55
What is the point of the 1GB version now, without any price advantage? The Raspberry Pi blog explains that it can't make the 1GB product cheaper, yet it will remain available in line with the organisation's "commitment to long-term support," especially for industrial and commercial customers.
As we near the 8th birthday of the Raspberry Pi (the exact date is said to be 29th Feb), it is worth a mini retrospective of the now iconic credit card sized bare board computer. The Raspberry Pi 1 Model B became available at the end of Feb 2012 and quickly became a favourite among tinkerers, hobbyists, and makers. It made various compromises to be a viable commercial product at the $35 target price, but over the years steadily increasing power and capabilities have brought us to the present day - with a machine that is "roughly forty times faster than the original Raspberry Pi," for the same $35 entry price.
CEO and Founder Eben Upton has shared an eye-opening bullet pointed overview of performance and feature gains delivered from the original RasPi to the current model, as below:
- 40× the CPU performance
- 8× the memory
- 10× the I/O bandwidth
- 4× the number of pixels on screen
- Two screens instead of one
- Dual-band wireless networking
Another advancement comes in the shape of affordability. While the original Raspberry Pi was marketed at $35 eight years ago, that same $35 price point should be more affordable to the public as their incomes have risen over time. According to the RasPi blog, we get all the above bullet pointed improvements for what is in-effect about $5 less.
If you are interested in acquiring one of the new cheaper 2GB boards, please make sure that your chosen reseller has updated its pricing. Here in the UK CPC has updated its prices and now charges £32.57 Inc. VAT for the 2GB model (over 1,800 are in stock at the time of writing).
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 2GB tech specs
- Broadcom BCM2711, quad-core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5GHz
- 2GB LPDDR4 SDRAM
- 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac wireless LAN, Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
- True Gigabit Ethernet
- 2x USB 3.0 ports, 2x USB 2.0 Ports
- Fully backwards compatible 40-pin GPIO header
- 2x Micro HDMI ports supporting up to 4K 60Hz video resolution
- 2-lane MIPI DSI/CSI ports for camera and display
- 4-pole stereo audio and composite video port
- MicroSD card slot for loading operating system and data storage
- Requires 5.1V, 3A power via USB-C or GPIO
- PoE (Power over Ethernet) enabled (requires PoE HAT)
If you need extra perfromance you can use active cooling
In related news the Raspberry Pi 4 was recently updated to fix a USB-C power supply issue and move the WLCSP SD card voltage switch to the top side to make it less damage prone, as well as a few non user experience affecting tweaks.
