Raspberry Pi, Now a Public Corporation, Recognises It Lost What Made It Competitive: Low Cost
GREED does not help anybody. It's what happens when people lose sight of anything but money, wrongly conflating capital gain with "progress" or accomplishment. Some companies do this by robbing their customers or abusing them some other way. Is that "success"?
Based on news reports (about half a dozen in [1, 2]), there is now a 'budget' device with 2GB of RAM. Raspberry Pi the company has explained to The Register why (incidentally, the founder of The Register died some days ago).
To me, 2GB has been enough for many years (I never had more than 2GB of RAM until 2020). My Raspberry Pi, which I use at this moment, has been running non-stop for 145 days (the other two machines ran for over 550 days so far). It very seldom needs more than 2GB of RAM because I use lean software.
For many people a Raspberry Pi - whether "3", "4", or "5" - is a server-like device without a monitor. Not many applications require more than 2GB of RAM unless they are poorly engineered or handle too much, too many, or too high a workload.
Raspberry Pi, as a company, must recognise the economics that made the original Raspberry Pi hugely popular, otherwise the likes of LattePanda can dethrone it.
Look what happened to Ubuntu after years of adding "bling" to lean Debian. Ubuntu has lost its charm and is still losing many users. █