Asked
— Edited
I've noticed that the prices of Single Board Computers (SBCs) have been increasing over the past few years. The ongoing RAM shortage seems to be contributing to this trend without any signs of it slowing down. A video by someone named Jeff discusses the current pricing situation, and he shares some insightful graphs from his recent research, which are interesting to see. I've posted a few graphs from the video to give some visual context, but I highly recommend watching the video for a complete understanding.
Here is the link to the video:
And here are some of the graphs mentioned:
Haha, that's crazy that you didn't know of Jeff Geerling. He's been in the SBC/Electronics scene for a while now on YouTube. I guess that's more my thing.
I don't think the second-hand market will rise too much until things truly get scarce, which will likely take some time. I'm not that concerned yet, but if we see COVID levels of scarcity, I might invest in a few extra boards or mini-PCs
As Jeff mentioned, if you need a low-end SBC, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W is an excellent SBC and should continue to be sold at a lower price. We can cross our fingers that one day we'll see ARCx support for Linux-based SBCs, the low-end Raspberry Pi, Radxa, and Orange Pi SBCs would be great candidates for affordable robot brains.