Raspberry Pi 3 with 64-bit quad-core SoC, built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth announced for $35
Months after introducing its most affordable Raspberry Pi Zero, the company has introduced the Raspberry Pi 3, successor of the Raspberry Pi 2 that was introduced back in February last year.
Context & Ripple Effects
Coming a year after the Raspberry Pi 2 and months after the $5 Pi Zero stripped the board to its floor price, the Raspberry Pi 3 holds the line at $35 while adding the two things the previous boards left to USB dongles: on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, alongside a move to a 64-bit quad-core SoC.
The launch sets a template the company then repeats: the same $35 entry point gets refreshed with faster silicon (the Model B+ in 2018, then the Pi 4 with 4K output and up to 4GB RAM), while wireless trickles down to the cheap tier when the Zero W brings 802.11n and Bluetooth to a $10 board.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the $35 board no longer need separate USB Wi-Fi adapters or Bluetooth dongles — connectivity is now included at the same price the Pi 2 launched at a year earlier.
Second-order effects
- With wireless built into the flagship board, the obvious next move is pulling it down-market — which the coverage confirms when the $10 Zero gains Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as the Zero W, compressing the price of a connected computer to $10.
Third-order effects
- Holding $35 across successive generations while upgrading CPU, RAM and I/O turns the Pi from an education hobbyist board into a fixed-price platform that industrial and embedded buyers can design against without repricing risk each cycle.
The trend: Single-board computing is consolidating around one stable $35 reference platform whose generational upgrades add capability rather than cost, with connectivity cascading down to ever-cheaper variants.