Why Mini PC Prices Keep Rising — And What It Means If You’re Waiting

Last updated 29 August 2026.

In November 2025, a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM cost $120. Today it is $205, and it took another $100 hike on top of that.

That is not a supply hiccup. It is the clearest consumer-level signal of something much larger: DRAM spot prices have risen roughly 700% in a year as AI datacentres absorbed the world’s memory supply. Every delayed graphics card, every mini PC that quietly got more expensive, every Apple configuration that vanished from the store traces back to that one number.

If you have been waiting for prices to settle before buying, this article is the uncomfortable news: analysts do not expect meaningful relief before 2028.

What this actually looks like on real products

Abstract percentages are easy to ignore. Specific machines are not.

The NVIDIA DGX Spark has been repriced twice. It was announced at CES 2025 for $2,999. It launched at $3,999. As of late February 2026 it is $4,699 — and NVIDIA said so publicly, citing “industry wide memory supply constraints.” Not a new model. Not more storage. The same machine, $1,700 more than the announced price.

The Beelink GTR9 Pro launched at a $1,985 MSRP. It now sells for $4,349. That is a 119% increase in under a year, on a product whose defining feature is 128GB of soldered LPDDR5x — in other words, a product that is mostly memory.

The Beelink ME mini tells the story most honestly. At launch, $329 bought you the NAS and a 2TB SSD. Today $329 buys the same NAS with a 1TB SSD — or with no SSD at all. Same price, half the storage. The increase is there; it is just hidden inside the box.

Why memory specifically, and why it won’t resolve quickly

Training and serving large AI models is a memory-bound problem before it is a compute-bound one. Datacentre operators buying high-bandwidth memory are not price-sensitive in the way consumer buyers are — if memory doubles in price, they buy it anyway, because the alternative is not deploying at all.

Memory fabrication capacity cannot be added quickly. New fabs take years. So the consumer market is competing for supply against buyers with far deeper pockets, and losing.

This is why the advice “just wait for prices to come down” — normally sound in computing — is currently wrong. The historical pattern where you wait six months and get more for your money has been suspended.

What this means if you are buying

Buy the memory you need now, not later. This is the single most important consequence. On a machine with soldered memory — which includes most mini PCs and every unified-memory AI box — the configuration you buy is the configuration you own forever. Upgrading later is not an option, and buying a second machine later will cost more than the upgrade would have.

If you are choosing between 32GB now and “I’ll get 64GB next year”, get the 64GB now. That gap will widen, not narrow.

Judge machines on what they cost today, not on their launch price. Review articles written in 2024 and 2025 quote MSRPs that no longer exist anywhere. A glowing review of a mini PC “at $639” is not useful if the machine is $1,239 today. Check current prices — including ours — rather than trusting a number in an old article.

Watch for shrinking configurations. The ME mini example is the pattern to look for. When a price stays flat, check whether the specification did too. Manufacturers protect headline prices by quietly reducing what is in the box.

What we would buy right now

We sell this hardware, so treat this as informed rather than neutral. But these are the machines where today’s price still makes sense to us:

• Beelink GTR9 Pro — $4,349. 128GB of LPDDR5x-8000, Ryzen AI Max+ 395, dual 10GbE, vapour-chamber cooling. Expensive against its launch price, and still the most unified memory per dollar in a machine this size.
• NVIDIA DGX Spark — $4,699. GB10 Grace Blackwell, 128GB unified memory, 4TB NVMe. If NVIDIA’s own software stack matters to your work, there is no substitute at this size.
• Beelink GTi15 Ultra — from $1,499. Core Ultra 9 285H. The sensible middle if you do not need 128GB.
• Beelink SER9 Pro — from $739. Ryzen 7 H 255. Still the best value per dollar in our range.

The honest version

We would rather tell you this plainly than pretend urgency we do not feel: we do not know that prices will rise again next quarter. Nobody does. What we do know is the documented direction of travel — one vendor has already raised the same product’s price twice in twelve months and said why.

If you need the machine, the case for waiting is weaker now than at any point in the last decade. If you do not need it, none of this is a reason to buy.

Questions about which configuration actually fits your workload? Email support@computahardware.com — we would rather spend ten minutes helping you choose correctly than process a return.