Teensy 4.1 Memory Upgrade Costs and the Impact of AI
For anyone that has been paying attention to the price of memory lately, prices have gone up and availability has gone down. This is easily seen if you have browsed SD cards on Amazon lately. A 32GB card like we ship with each of our baseboards that cost $5 last year is now $20.
This is mainly due to the impact of AI data center construction consuming pretty much all the supply of memory chips and if not using the chips directly, they are consuming the production capacity at memory manufacturers where those chips are made.
A prime example is the 2Gb Flash chip W25N02KVZEIR which is a commonly used chip for the Teensy 4.1 memory upgrades. These parts used to be about $6. As I type this, DigiKey has 6 in stock for $22.94 each and they will not accept backorders for it anymore due to heavily constrained supply.
If you go out and try to buy the parts to configure a Teensy 4.1 with 16MB PSRAM and 2Gb of Flash yourself, you will spend about $65 on parts plus shipping from a couple of different companies and maybe tax, so you can easily spend $70-$80 total and you will still have to solder it up yourself and hope it works.
The good news in all of this is that ProtoSupplies.com invested in a fair amount of inventory of the memory devices used with the Teensy 4.1 at reasonable prices. We don’t charge inflated market pricing, and at least for now, it is actually cheaper to buy some of the Fully Loaded Teensy from ProtoSupplies.com with memory installed and tested then it is to source the parts and build it yourself.
That same Teensy outlined about which is our model number DEV-24-2G16 is $60.95 from ProtoSupplies.com fully assembled and tested + $6.95 shipping and no tax unless you are located in WA state.
