Is It Really That Expensive? Raspberry Pi Foundation Launches Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB Memory for $120

The single-board computer manufacturer Raspberry Pi Foundation is rumored by Landian.news to possibly launch a Raspberry Pi 5 equipped with 16GB of memory. Now, this new version has been released, but the price has shockingly reached $120.

It's worth noting that the Raspberry Pi 5's 8GB version is priced at 80, meaning an additional 8GB of memory costs an extra 40. However, a Raspberry Pi 5 2GB version can be purchased for just $50.

The 16GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 is essentially identical to the 8GB version in other hardware aspects, including the use of Broadcom's BCM2712 chip. The optimized BCM2717 chip supports over 8GB of memory, leading Raspberry Pi to collaborate with Micron to obtain a package that includes 8 16Gbit LPDDR4X flash memory chips.

So, what scenarios require such large memory? If only using the Raspberry Pi OS, the memory requirement is quite low. However, operating systems like the Ubuntu desktop version could benefit from more memory to enhance the user experience.

Of course, if you're running Docker, then larger memory can also support more Docker containers simultaneously, given that many containers still consume some memory even when inactive.

Whether the BCM2712 chip can support these use cases is another matter. Currently, Landian.news's 4GB Raspberry Pi 3B+ runs several containers without any issues.