New $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W comes with 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0
Although major Raspberry Pi announcements are very few and far between, you know that when there is one, it's worth paying attention. Take for example the Raspberry Pi Zero — the $5 (£4) board that apparently came …
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The $5 Pi Zero arrived as a stripped-down board with no connectivity, leaving buyers to add a WiFi dongle or skip networking entirely. The new Zero W closes that gap for an extra $5, bringing the same built-in 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 that Raspberry Pi already put into the $35 Raspberry Pi 3 down to its cheapest tier.
The move matters because it makes wireless a default feature across the entire Raspberry Pi lineup rather than a premium option, and it sets the baseline that the later $15 Zero 2 W would build on.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the entry-level board no longer need a separate WiFi adapter or USB hub to get the Zero online — headless and IoT projects become viable at $10 out of the box.
- Raspberry Pi now sells two tiers of the same small board ($5 wired, $10 wireless), letting it capture hobbyists who previously had to step up to the $35 Pi 3 just for built-in radio.
Second-order effects
- Competitors in the low-cost single-board market face pressure to match sub-$10 boards with integrated WiFi and Bluetooth, since a $5 board without radios is no longer a like-for-like comparison.
- Accessory makers selling USB WiFi dongles for the Pi lose their most price-sensitive customer segment as the dongle becomes unnecessary for new builds.
Third-order effects
- If every board in the lineup ships with wireless by default, cheap single-board computers consolidate around networked designs, pushing differentiation toward processor performance and price rather than connectivity — the trajectory the Zero line followed from $10 to the $15 Zero 2 W.
The trend: Wireless connectivity is becoming a standard, near-free feature of sub-$15 computing hardware, with each Raspberry Pi Zero generation absorbing what was previously an add-on cost.