Despite the date on the announcement, this one wasn’t a joke. On April 1, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton confirmed another round of price increases across most of the company’s lineup, driven by what he described as a sevenfold increase in LPDDR4 DRAM prices over the past twelve months. The flagship Pi 500+, the keyboard-form-factor all-in-one that launched at a genuinely clever price point, has jumped $150 to $410. Apple’s M3 Mac Mini currently retails for around $430 depending on the retailer.

The Pi 500+ was always a premium product by Raspberry Pi standards, but this price trajectory is striking. It cost $280 in February. It now costs $410. That’s a nearly 50% increase in under two months on a product that didn’t change at all. The Pi 5 16GB climbs $100 to $299.99. The Pi 4 and Pi 5 in 4GB configurations are up $25, and 8GB models rise $50. Compute Modules haven’t been spared either, with price increases ranging from $11.25 to $100 depending on the variant.

Upton also introduced a new product in this announcement: a 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 priced at $83.75. It doesn’t use a standard 3GB LPDDR4 chip (because those don’t really exist), but rather a dual-chip configuration using two 1.5GB dies on the same PCB. It slots between the 2GB and 4GB models to give budget-constrained buyers an option that doesn’t require jumping to the increasingly pricey 4GB tier.

Not everything went up. The Raspberry Pi 400, Pi Zero, Zero 2W, Pi 3, and sub-4GB Pi 4 and Pi 5 models are holding their prices, at least for now. Upton credited pre-existing LPDDR2 inventory and lower memory requirements for keeping those products stable. Older LPDDR2-based products are effectively insulated from the current crisis, because the capacity being consumed by AI data centers is primarily LPDDR4 and DDR5, not legacy memory types.

The Raspberry Pi situation is a useful illustration of just how broadly the DRAM crisis is reaching. This isn’t a product category you’d typically associate with GPU memory shortages or HBM capacity wars. Single-board computers are hobbyist hardware, robotics platforms, and low-cost educational tools. The fact that the LPDDR4 memory they use is experiencing sevenfold price increases is a downstream consequence of HBM manufacturing diverting wafer capacity away from commodity DRAM, and it’s affecting everything from Pi clusters running home servers to industrial embedded applications that have no obvious substitute.

Upton closed the announcement noting that Raspberry Pi looks forward to unwinding these price increases once the situation abates, though no timeline was offered. Analysts and memory manufacturers alike have suggested meaningful relief is unlikely before 2027 or 2028 at the earliest.