Raspberry Pi 1 Model B was introduced to the world almost exactly 8 years ago on February 29, 2012, and to celebrate the Raspberry Pi Foundation decided to permanently lower the price of Raspberry Pi 4B with 2GB RAM to $35.
This was made possible due to falling RAM prices. The 1GB RAM version will still be sold for $35 to industrial and commercial customers due to long term support commitments. Sadly, the 4GB RAM version remains at $55, so no discount for this version for now.
Due to inflation, Raspberry Pi 4B 2G is even cheaper than the first Raspberry Pi 1 since $35 in 2012 is roughly equivalent to $40 now. But more importantly, 8 years make a huge difference in terms of performance and features. The Raspberry Pi Foundation explains the new board is now 40 times faster, has eight times more memory (the very first batch had 256MB RAM), 10 times the I/O bandwidth (Gigabit Ethernet), four times the resolution (4K vs FullHD), support for dual-screen setup, and dual-band wireless networking.
Many resellers haven’t updated the price just yet, but Raspberry Pi 4B with 2GB RAM will be shortly available for $35 plus taxes and shipping on Adafruit, Pimoroni UK, OKDO Germany, and other resellers. If you prefer purchasing from China, Seeed Studio has already updated their price to $35.
Via RPi Blog
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Other than memory what are the features of the Rpi 4 1GB, that the Rpi4 2GB cannot provide for industrial and commercial customers?
Thermal or power issues from the marginal increase in useage?
running out of memory more quickly
Ahh, yes, the old debugging technique to detect memory leaks. (sarcasm off)
Some companies insist on replacement hardware having the same product code.
If a product has industrial/medical certifications and the hardware changes, it may have to be re-certified, and it costs money. I’m not sure that would be the case for Raspberry Pi 4 1GB vs 2GB though.
Most customers wouldn’t consider this a certification-breaking change. But we’ll continue to make the 1GB model available for the minority who do.
1, Is a Rev 1.2 board a significant revision then?
Would fitting any cooling device also significantly alter the thermal profile and total weight of board and cooling.
2, Some companies insist on replacement hardware having the same product code.
So original boards wth all undocumented flaws and feature not addressed ?
That could be true. But regardless, when a software was validated to run reliably at 1 GB of RAM, in some environments you don’t want to suddenly change the amount of visible RAM because you don’t know how the software reacts. Some will for example automatically adjust their settings to accommodate for the extra RAM and end up in a less reliable situation. Think of an application server doubling the number of connections for the double of RAM, it might not necessarily work well for other reasons (file descriptors etc). And you don’t necessarily want to have to double your validations either (older models, newer models). Thus if you maintain your product over the long term, sometimes you have to artificially restrict some features during the product’s life to limit the number of unexpected changes. In this case it’s just easier to stick to the same model for as long as it’s available.
> Some will for example automatically adjust their settings to accommodate for the extra RAM and end up in a less reliable situation.
Been there, seen that. An image database application that suffers from a memory leak when running on systems with 4GB or more RAM and crashes at least once a week when not restarted periodically runs indefinitely when believing main memory would be less than 3.4GB (x64 Linux).
One persons flaw is another’s feature. If your code already runs perfect the there is no need to upset it with external changes.
As always: https://www.xkcd.com/1172/
At this price it’s an excellent features/price ratio. I suspect it will force some vendors to abandon a number of outdated SoCs that can’t be competitive at all. Those making cheaper boards will still have a point staying on older boards, but those making comparable boards for more than $35 will have to have compelling arguments (eMMC, crypto extensions, thermal dissipation, SATA, higher RAM bandwidth, or any extra features).
> At this price it’s an excellent features/price ratio.
It was this even at the old price already. At least when trying to buy SBCs as a business in Europe sourcing from reputable local dealers and not ordering from the other end of the world in the hope declaration is fake so you can avoid customs/tax/VAT and so on.
In DE the cheapest price I get an Rock Pi 4 with 2GB but without WiFi/BT for is 63€ (at innet24.de who share the same postal address with ALLNET for a simple reason). Normal buyers will pay at least 76€ for this variant. When they want WiFi/BT too, it’s 78,50€ at ALLNET’s ‘factory outlet’ or even 94€ for the average buyer. Now compare with RPi 4B (though the Wi-Fi implementation there is just single/onboard antenna).
Speaking of WiFi: I would believe RPi Trading Ltd. guys will provide a new wireless firmware soon to fix the Kr00k flaw while the rest of the SBC world also relying on Cypress/BroadCom wireless chips as usual simply doesn’t give a sh*t and is still vulnerable to BroadPwn discovered 2 1/2 years ago.
I got my pi4 1GB + power supply + shipping + taxes for 51 EUR last June from kubii.fr, which I find pretty reasonable (they charged only ~5 EUR for shipping). The prices have since increased a little bit there, it should cost roughly 10 EUR more, which means that the 2GB model finally remains at the same price as what I could have got before. But I agree that when you can find a local shop with a correct price it’s better (and it often shortens the shipping time). However local shops are often less interesting for other brands which make less buzz because they have little to no stock and just serve as an intermediary inflating the price :-/
I’m even saying bullshit, the apparent price increase is just because on the site they show the price with tax included (38.50 EUR) and I compared it with the price on my invoice (31.63 EUR) so it’s basically the same.
If you want to use only 1G on a 2G board you could do so by booting with mem=
(of course there might still be minimal differences since the power consumption and thermal characteristics may be (marginally) different on 1G and 2G boards