There were sellers buying the smallest RAM units, changing the RAM chips, and then reselling them as the higher RAM SKUs. The sellers who do this don’t always care to use good RAM chips and may even use QA reject parts. When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi foundation.
The user friendly option would be to print the amount of RAM in very large letters on the PCB.
There happens to be a lot of suitable surface on the PCB to the right of the text "Raspberry Pi 5" on the PCB anyway (§). Right now the amount of RAM is hard to read and easy to modify (move a little tiny SMD resistor).
Drawback: You need different silkscreens for different amounts of RAM.
A little bit of acetone and a q-tip will remove the silkscreen, and then the PCB can easily re-marked by the scammer. Having a new silkscreen made is pocket change.
Put a sticker over it. Sure, the PCB says 2GB, the sticker says 8GB, it was sold as 8GB, how many buyers are going to dig in and really understand what's going on?
That's still trivial to defeat. They're very capable and determined. In the olden days they used to mill the top of microprocessor ie intel x86 to remove the engraving and engrave the fake label. These days I imagine it's way more advanced
One way of doing it... You can blast away the original markings / copper using laser and put something in place like sheet of copper or something that resembles copper, add solder mask layer on top. Done.
These operations are not hobbyist level, they have access to the machinery to make it trivial.
No, this is not sufficient, since it would still allow you to swap to shite ram of the same size. This is an age-old problem for counterfeits. The ink on the chip/PCB isn't worth anything. The only way to actually catch this is to do a IQC that runs a full RAM test and hope that if you can't see a difference in performance (throughput, BER, timings, etc), then the chip is correct, with a bit of periodic de-lidding for anything suspicious/sampled. Then, if you can afford it, you blacklist the vendors that are caught changing things.
They also added a bit of internal ink, which is worth just a little more:
> we now also program in some other device attributes, meaning that switching parts of the same size may not work.
Working with vendors in China is entirely adversarial (mostly because their supply chain is vulnerable too), at this scale.
it can be very easily done by burning it with laser on prepared blank box on silkscreen - even iPhones are marked this way with their own serial numbers
the only reason why pis are not marked this way is because raspberry didn't wanted to (so far)
Embedding it on the board won't work. Fraudsters are really good at doctoring chip and board makings nowadays, even below the solder mask. It's hard to imagine as a westerner, but the necessary equipment to do that kind of thing is trivially available in most of east Asia.
On-chip fuses would be a good solution. Which, of course, is already what they're using to lock chips to specific memory. There's just not a good reason to brick the board when the memory doesn't match. Have the firmware flash a warning on the screen before boot. Problem solved.
Mac Minis used to have soldered on SSDs, but the 2024 model is upgradable. A lot of people purchased a cheaper Mac Mini and upgraded the storage themselves. Most people would argue this is a good thing, even if some of those Mac Minis were resold. This is no different.
> Mac Minis used to have soldered on SSDs, but the 2024 model is upgradable. A lot of people purchased a cheaper Mac Mini and upgraded the storage themselves. Most people would argue this is a good thing, even if some of those Mac Minis were resold. This is no different.
Replacing a socketed component that is modular by design, even if it's not officially intended to be upgraded outside the factory, is worlds different from replacing BGA components on a densely packed PCB.
That said, there could also be a middle ground by just providing some way to look up the hardware specs of a given serial number. Post the part numbers of the components that you're concerned about being replaced and provide tools to verify as many of them through software as is practical. Allow owners to know if their device has been modified and how so, but allow them to choose what to do with that information.
Combating fraudsters trying to pass off modified and/or refurbished devices as genuine is valid, but preventing owners from modifying or repairing their own or knowingly purchasing such devices from honest resellers is not.
This is very different. The Raspberry Pi 5 RAM upgrades are arbitrage, involving soldering on dodgy RAM, at the expense of the unsuspecting retail buyer vs. people upgrading their own Mac Minis for themselves and without any soldering.
It absolutely is different. You just said the Mac Mini is upgradable but the Pi is still soldered on. Desoldering and soldering a new RAM unit carries huge risks no matter how skilled people claim they are at it.
> It absolutely is different. You just said the Mac Mini is upgradable but the Pi is still soldered on.
I'm sorry, you seem to be confused. Soldering is not the problem. Locking up the hardware to have hardware provisioned tier limits to block you from upgrading your own hardware is silly.
And do note, raspberry pi doesn't prevent you from switching RAM chips. The board will continue to work just the same with high capacity variants. But for some reason raspberry pi hardcodes a max memory size that prevents you from using the hardware upgrade you paid for in full.
There is no fix that can be suggested in that thread. Pi LTD doesn't have the modified RAM Pis to test their firmware against nor should they be required to support modified hardware.
The fix is turning the detection of the modified ram from a boot failure into a warning and log output, then tell users asking for support that they don't have support for Pis that were modified by third parties.
Instead we get restrictions on all users because some users buy stuff from random marketplaces online?
I don't know why you're suggesting the fix is that they offer support for 3rd modded RAM.
Oh no, there were bad actors on the market, let's lock the hardware so cheaper but genuine options can't emerge.
> When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi
It's not their problem then, the seller is responsible for it and I think we can assume the user has a brain so they knew they could buy a more expensive option from the authorized sellers. Isn't this the case?
> When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi foundation.
They don't need the resellers help for that! I've already been burned twice thinking "I'll use a raspberry pi for this small project" and having it die within a month because reliably reading/writing to an SD card is hard or something.
Between the notorious unreliability, crazy price hikes, trademark or whatever disputes, and this anti consumer ewaste generating policy, I can't think of any reason I'd ever patronize them again.. my only regret is it took me two purchases to learn this lesson!
The much easier and more reasonable solution here would be for the RPi Foundation to ignore RMA requests for boards not bought from them or an authorized reseller.
Painful that the RPi higher memory versions are so crazy overpriced that made the RAM swap, an obviously expensive process, meaningful.
The solution of ofcourse would be to have market prices that are meaningful rather than trying to retain the overpricing moat through sabotage.
The person in the forum thread claimed to be repairing CM5s and CM4s. Unusual but it seems like an otherwise hyper reactive response by the RPi Foundation. Something you wouldn’t batt an eye at if it were Apple instead.
Doing a RAM swap and then selling the resulting unit as if it were a Raspberry Pi of the higher RAM capacity might be construed as trademark infringement[0]. And in general it's fairly difficult to make arguments in antitrust cases that boil down to "yes, your honor, everything they're doing is within their rights but I don't like it".
[0] At the same time, the scammers could probably get away with this by putting "Upgraded to 16GB!" in the title of their eBay listings or whatever, in the same way that fraudulent storage devices are labeled as "upgraded" (read: lying about their capacity). That doesn't impact the antitrust analysis though.
I certainly agree that such a reseller should clearly state the modification, and not pretend its an authentic RPi 8GB unit.
But if this is the real concern, they could just display the fact that "Unoriginal RAM detected" to inform the user its not a vanilla RPi Foundation product, so buyers understand the situation, but continue booting normally.
For every user asking questions and facing issues for such-or-such firmware or software support they need in their projects, that same user would have appeared regardless if their Pi came from RP directly or through a reseller.
Every board sold would have been an extra user, the reseller isn't adding full users (although they may increase the indirect customer base!), so even gaining a user through a reseller increases the amortization divider for the support burden.
Now lets consider RAM chip support burden, the original Pi RAM chips can have issues generating support burden, and so can the reseller RAM chips. Unless RP foundation refuses to upstream link training / RAM bringup patches from resellers, there is no real additional support burden.
In fact if RP were a little more creative, they could have tried contacting the resellers to explain they can continue their modding business as long as they advertise it clearly as modified, and to inform them they will be receiving units that didn't pass the RAM tests from the automated lines, since they're going to desolder the chips anyway, this can save costs for RP foundation.
in those jurisdictions where either price discrimination or locking hardware are not illegal, it is typically perfectly legal to reverse engineer for compatibility purposes. So nothing prevents such resellers from upping their game and learning a thing or two about link training and general SDRAM bringup.
Once they have acquired the knowledge legally in such jurisdictions the product just flows in the other jurisdictions anyway.
Courts upheld the monopolistic position of microsoft etc. for decades, but respect has no finality, "re" + "spect" to review, so later such companies were fined for their decades long transgressions.
But during those decades it may appear legal to the average consumer.
All of this is pretty irrelevant from a legal perspective.
Reverse engineering is legal, but manufacturers don’t have to help you figure out how to reverse engineer their products and they’re allowed to design their products in a way that makes it difficult.
There’s generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like hardware lockdowns of this nature illegal, especially for companies that are not in regulated industries or are not monopoly/oligopoly players.
> All of this is pretty irrelevant from a legal perspective.
> Reverse engineering is legal, but manufacturers don’t have to help you figure out how to reverse engineer their products and they’re allowed to design their products in a way that makes it difficult.
I'm not asking for help to figure this out, and of course RP is allowed to shoot themselves in any foot they like.
Consider Europe where such reverse engineering is perfectly legal for compatibility purposes. Let's consider an idealized scenario, there were no security bugs or other issues with the product that would justify reverse engineering RP blobs in public. When they do something like this, they are GIVING CARTE BLANCHE to public reverse engineering efforts to attain compatibility with other RAM chips. Why would you provide legal cover in some jurisdictions for others in publicly reverse engineering your own products by introducing artificial incompatibility?
Also from a consumer perspective, RP tries to place itself front and center in maker communties, emphasizing modularity, not just hobbyists, also companies build and design end products using RP units. All of these companies must now be wondering where RP Foundations exact red line resides: can we resell an RP board in a Kiosk we made? or only for as long as it doesn't compete with RP's future Kiosk modules? Today its the RAM upgrade, but tomorrow RP modules may refuse to boot some popular Kiosk hardware intentionally. What prevents RP Foundation from eventually "not copying" end-application hardware like a Kiosk design from their customers, and then enforcing compatibility only with RP Kiosks?
So not only are they providing legal cover for public reverse engineering efforts, they are scaring part of their customer base.
> There’s generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like hardware lockdowns of this nature illegal, especially for companies that are not in regulated industries or are not monopoly/oligopoly players.
That's a very shallow interpretation of law, looking only at what RP is or isn't allowed to do.
There's generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like reverse engineering for compatibility or security applications illegal either.
The part replacement isn't being blocked? The OP's CM5 with replaced RAM is still a working CM5 according to him. And fully functional compared to before the replacement.
"Each chip is programmed with the timing settings and storage size settings of just the RAM we ship it with, and doesn't know how to boot with anything else." I don't know if you could call that "blocking." I mean you could call it that but I don't know if that's legally what it would be.
So European institution following this discussion would be wise to ASAP formally request RP Foundation to describe it either as a blocking security mechanism, or just a compatibility issue.
Between current inaction and eventual action, it settles the position of RP foundation, so they can't switch back and forth between "these people are circumventing security" vs "its just an unintended incompatibility", as long as they don't reveal their position its neither here nor there.
What if the manufacturer charged no markup on RAM price, wouldn't it make "illegal upgrading" pointless because they couldn't compete on price? The manufacturer buys RAM in bulk and has better pricing.
Curiously NVIDIA have long allowed consumer GPUs to be upgraded with larger memory chips - they could very easily reject booting those configurations. This is something done almost exclusively by unsavory Chinese actors who then sell on the bare retail PCBs (core removed, since they use different PCBs and heatsinks) to various scammers that foist them upon unsuspecting retail buyers.
In short, someone at NVIDIA really hates retail, but loves Chinese sanction busters.
I think they should instead just introduce a clear system for verifying that a Raspberry Pi is genuine. For example, a code printed directly on the device. If you enter that code on the website, you can see exactly which model it belongs to and how often it has been used. That way, you could determine whether a Raspberry Pi is new or used and whether it has been modified.
I saw that once at a thermal paste manufacturer. They used it to solve the problem of counterfeit thermal paste.You just have to get people to actually use the system and tell anyone else who asks for support but doesn't have an original copy to GTFO.This would allow them to avoid the increased support burden without limiting people's ability to upgrade their Raspberry Pi.
Chinese scammers have gotten good at abusing those "codes" by having a list of "known good" codes and printing them on multiple units. And because those holographic codes some companies used are printed in China, the scammers just use the same equipment during the night shift.
Just show everyone who looks up the code how often the code has already been checked. If you get a new product but the code has been checked 628 times, it’s probably a reused code.
fun fact is that some chinese electronics manufacturers do exactly that with their products (even simple ones like led night lights), holographic qr-code on box that can be scanned and verified without opening box and second code inside box to verify box wasn't swapped
The real story here is that people are selling modded Pis as higher-memory versions. And this check actually caught them + is circumventable. The restriction is somewhat annoying to a small subset of enthusiasts but seems to catch genuine fraud.
The memory that they are placing in it has to be cheap enough to be worth their while. Which in this climate is highly probably faulty memory, or memory that runs at a different speed/spec to the one advertised to come with the RPi. That is fraud.
It's unfortunate, but given that there are so many ways you could end up with a poor quality knock-off (i.e. Amazon, sorry, 'third party marketplaces') it's probably something that skews the tradeoff quite significantly.
I guess there are more individuals who will be upset when they can't run something on their equipment as it was advertised to them than will be upset that they can't re-solder the RAM.
There are probably even fewer individuals who'll do due diligence in their own supply chain. Whilst those that suffer are technically suffering from some kind of crime / civil wrong - the chance of them getting a remedy for this is going to be non-existent.
Given the how overpriced the high RAM models sold by the RPi foundation are, I think they just can use good RAM and still make a nice profit. Like you know RPi foundation could, if they were not greedy.
> The memory that they are placing in it has to be cheap enough to be worth their while.
You're framing this as if no reputable vendor is willing or able to source cheaper parts.
If they can get a better deal in more RAM, why can't they upgrade the boards? As a consumer, doesn't that benefit you as well?
> Which in this climate is highly probably faulty memory, (...)
That's specious reasoning and blatant fear-mongering. Consumer protection laws require vendors to support their products. If RAM is faulty, whether it was hand soldered by Eben Upton himself or hacked from a Soviet fridge, vendors are compelled to support customers. This means vendors ultimately have an interest in minimizing faulty equipment, because it hurts their bottom line.
So why can't people have the right to upgrade their hardware? I thought we already went through this battle in the 1980s.
This is classic gaslighting technique corporations use to extract more profit. Modifications or upgrades made by small business = fraud, OEM selling different SKUs = legitimate business.
If a small business is modifying the product and not telling the eventual customer they've done so how is that not fraud? I don't want to buy a Raspberry Pi with a memory chip from who knows who which might have not passed QA modified by people who may or may not do a decent job at soldering it to the board.
A unit that rpi themselves sold with 8g is different than a unit that someone else modified. The reworked unit is not sold with the disclosure that it has been hacked and no longer covered by any warranty, and the memory installed is of totally unknown provenance and quality, timing specs, failed qa, etc. Even the simple process of heating everything up to desolder & resolder temps is not free, it degrades everything, the pcb itself, the epoxy holding the traces and pads down, and all the components, and means higher chance of some failure happening sooner than it would have. But it's sold as a real rpi unit for real rpi price or a little less to beat real ones.
That is the fraud they speak of.
You should be free to do this to your unit if you like of course, and rpi has infinite other possible ways they could have chosen to address the problem and didn't have to do it this way. I'm only saying there is actually a problem.
I certainly don’t say this with the implication that I would do what RPi did if I was in their shoes or that I agree with it, but the answer to your question is “you probably can upgrade it yourself but you just haven’t figured out how to.”
Just like the idea that you “can’t” rip a Blu-ray Disc was only a matter of time and energy to thwart.
I also don’t think this device is one that has ever been sold with the expectation that it would be upgraded. It is (or was) a cheap single board computer.
Like it’s kind of funny to me how this is becoming a controversy among people who probably didn’t even think raspberry pi memory could be replaced in any semblance of an economically sensible way as of yesterday.
I love how we think we own our hardware, but secretly we don't. Surprised though that even a Raspberry Pi now thinks this as well. They grew big _because_ of tinkering...
Reading through the EEPROM repo issue[1] makes me a little more sympathetic to the "feature", but I still don't like it at all.
It might help in the short term to stop dodgy resellers who mod the boards with cheap upgraded RAM to make a buck or two...
But the Pi itself is always taking one step forward, one step back in terms of firmware. I've been tinkering with some Qualcomm boards from Radxa and things are slightly better there, though you don't have anywhere near the ecosystem you get with Pi (or onboarding niceties).
I am incredibly unsympathetic to statements like the first reply to the issue "This sounds like a hardware issue. Please can you contact the reseller for a refund." from the "Software Engineering Manager at Raspberry Pi, working on firmware, bootloader, security and low-level Linux software." (Read: I suspect this person knew exactly what happened here)
If the reply was along the lines of "This is a new firmware check to curb fraud related to undisclosed aftermarket RAM upgrades with potentially unreliable chips." - I'd be fine with it, but basically just coming out to gaslight the user about the issue leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. In the end, they had to come clean anyway, big surprise.
I say this as someone who has been loving Pis despite their price for the straightforward and reliable long-term software support. Not gonna pretent like I'll never buy a Pi again, but it's another strike moving me to explore other options in the future.
>(Read: I suspect this person knew exactly what happened here)
Yes they knew everything about how training DDR4 RAM works, they knew everything including that the seller doesn't know how their training code works and bailed out and no longer exists but still got paid and that it was worth it for the reseller.
One thing I like here is Raspberry Pi still lets engineers have interactions with end users like this (despite them not doing the best PR all the time).
Really? I found that issue and all of the related ones really disingenuous from the Pi folks; they just stonewalled everyone with "contact your hardware seller" rather than explaining what was going on even at the glossed-over level they managed in the forum thread.
I do feel for them; they're between a rock and a hard place with mis-labeled clone boards. But their implementation seems to be the most hostile and opaque possible way to achieve these goals (which I also understand from an anti-cloning standpoint, but especially anymore, it's going to get reversed anyway).
I dunno - I think the victims in a lot of these cases aren't stupid. They can't contact the seller because they bought it from 'some guy' who's disappeared into the night. They know they've been had and are trying to get a knock-off board working at the expense of [the time of] someone completely unrelated to this.
It's pretty normal for the first port of call / warranty claim for a busted item to be the dealer that sold it to you.
I absolutely agree that engaging with these people beyond "we added checks to ensure your board has the RAM it came with, and this one failed" is a waste of time, but I think that at least providing that level of response would be much more aligned with the image they're still trying to project than just stonewalling entirely.
It would be much more user friendly if there was a way to check the serial of a particular PI and see it's original hardware config, manufacture date, and so on.
Why do you think they are going down? My impression is that their prices are actually good. Especially for CM4 compatible alternatives. They fab in China just like everybody else. Although they do some or all assembly (soldering) in UK I think.
My understanding is that Raspberry Pi differentiates itself primarily with software support, which is hard to duplicate trivially like a physical device.
It feels like there could be a middle ground here where the Pi would show some annoying error message at boot that the RAM doesn't match the CPU's anticipated spec.
Any sellers caught doing this would quickly be flagged by the community as unreliable; also purchase protection is pretty strong these days.
Maybe I’m being charitable, but my impression was that originally they only had access to non-open gpu chips and therefore were forced to have black-box gpu blobs
IIRC it was something like that & even if initially understandable, IIRC it did not really make sense to continue doing that once they were famous enough & had some money to work with (to e.g. pick a more open chip).
That that still have a closed source firmware, which makes it possible for them to pull off the bullshit discussed in the article & this discussion - that proves there was & still is a shady undertone under all that openness facade of the RPi foundation. :P
They frame this as fraud-prevention but I don't really buy it.
I think of I this way. As a casual/hobbyist user, maybe I'm happy to accept a 10% risk of the device failing prematurely in exchange for saving $20 on a memory upgrade. Ok, so these unscrupulous sellers will never tell me that info up-front...but this defective-by-design system doesn't help me either. The sellers playing this shady game might not accept returns (one example of this already in the github issue linked from the main thread) and there's no sign anything's wrong until you receive and boot up. So the user is left holding the bag, with kneecapped memory capacity, and the same stability risks anyway!
If these DRAM-upgraders are really so clever, they'll find a way to bypass this (patched firmware or hacked serial in the CPU). At least, it'll work until the user is out of the 30-day period when they finally update the firmware.
Or if the CPU/mainboard can really detect this in a non-defeatable manner, why cut the usable memory? Just print something to dmesg or stderr when the user logs in. "This device's memory has been modified and may be unstable, warranty blah blah"
Apple locks down fingerprint/camera module swaps, but at least there's a plausible (afaik) security rationale for it. Seems like Raspberry just got tired of being undercut on price.
If the ram chips pass proper testing, why should anyone care where they come from?
If RMA process includes hardware verification then rpi doesn’t get bled out by absorbing the cost of “counterfeits”
If they widely tell people what the market is doing and make all the tools public, they will offload the work of dealing with counterfeits while levelling up the tinkerers
They should make a form where you input the serial number and apply for a key, applying that key in config.txt disables the hardware verification checks on the bootrom.
I think this is really dumb and stupid. Not that I don't agree with their reasoning - it's actually very reasonable - but that I have a lot of distaste from "saving the customer from themselves" type antifeatures.
Practically speaking, though, this antifeature doesn't affect most people, because I don't think most people are willing to take a heat gun to a microsoldered part just to save a few bucks on RAM. If the RAM was socketed somehow - which at this scale and performance tier is not possible - then I'd probably be way angrier.
Why not just paint the original chips with some special ink that says VOID IF TAMPERED over the RAM chips and the board? Pretty much like other hardware manufacturers do with seals or stickers, wouldn't this solve the issue?
If they can make it not work with 3rd party chips, they can make it have a internal tamper code instead. If the Chinese sellers can somehow remove the internal tamper code then they'd also be able to bypass the current lock, which they seem they can't.
This is pretty clearly just them trying to block resellers that mod their boards as that removes price pressure from them. It's end user hostile, full stop.
> their platform is built for hobbiests and tinkerers
I don't think that's been true for a long time. Their main market is commercial users now - reference what happened with COVID shortages and RPi prioritizing nearly all of their capacity to commercial users, leaving tinkerers with little to no stock.
When there were shortages and they were rationing, they explicitly stated it was to protect their commercial customers. The shortages were across all SKUs, not limited to compute modules.
I think there's actually a lot of commercial use of the regular boards as well. Plenty of products for which a Pi is sufficiently capable and for which they can use something off-the-shelf rather than developing a custom PCB.
It's tough but I'd still wager that more hobbyists and tinkers will complain when their 8GB Pi that they bought from Amazon, or anywhere really, won't actually run their project that they wanted to use 8GB for properly because that 8GB is little more than a fiction.
Except linked in this exact discussion is a thread where the person is asking RPi for remedy instead because the seller has been unable to assist (i.e. has run off with their money).
That RAM is not fiction, it was working before they updated and worked again when they removed the update. It's failing verification, not failing to function.
It is not tjat well known, but this is not the first DRM bullshit from the RPi foundation - they played similar tricks with the camera interface, to force people to use their overpriced camera instead of better and cheaper third party ones.
We can't normalize this cash-grab user-hostile late stage capitalism bullshit.
Their argument assumes users are idiots - we had swappable components for years, and while there were cheating actors, market has invented things like brands and trust, you know? You don't have to buy models from the sellers you don't trust, nobody forces you to.
I mean the Pi currently makes little to no sense to buy anyway. So locking down parts barely moves the needle. The value proposition is unbelievably bad at spending upwards of $423 CAD for a 16GB Raspberry Pi. Which is literally just the bare board.
The 2026 financial report is apparently this Thursday on Sept 24. So will see how this played out for them. Their stock is all over the place anyway with low float.
I think the Pi units have much higher margins on higher RAM versions plus RAM is expensive, so the 16GB is indeed a bad deal. For my workloads I heavily use all onboard peripeals, GPU and CPU, but need only 1GB RAM. So I get a good deal even compared to Chinese alternatives.
The pi is useful because it is well supported. Either buy a x86, or buy pi - anything else and good luck keeping it working. You need to plan on spending your time writing/maintain the drivers to keep your system working.
Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers.
Maybe. Read the fine print of your contract closely. I am not familiar with that system, but my experience with boards like this is that they have "support", but often not in the mainline kernel, it is in patches that they apply to some yocto build and so you are always several years behind the latest kernel. You may also discover that the support doesn't cover some accessories and so you may not be able to upgrade if you want wifi to work. They will backport knows CVE fixes, but anything that was fixed without realizing it should be a CVE will never be back ported.
> Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers.
Reminds me of Adobe's history to be honest. They also were big on hooking the young to their ecosystem, including turning more than one blind eye towards piracy, and once they had a captive userbase plus a lack of competition, they enshittified.
I find their explanation to be completely reasonable.
As they clearly explained, giving you the choice to swap the RAM chips would create broader systemic problems that would lead to bad customer experiences and a support burden for their organization.
You'd be ok with that trade?
Local maximalists like to imagine a world where everything is aligned with their own personal incentives, but then present this world as being filled with freedom and choices. Just not anyone else's freedom or choices, only their own.
No, RPis are very inexpensive computers. What you're advocating would considerably increase the price of a Raspberry Pi to pay for the additional support burden (if this is even reasonable--should they hire a bunch of people just to answer "you bought a RPi w/ bootleg RAM" over and over again?), and that defeats the point.
This hasn't been true for 5 or 6 years and there is very little reason to buy one over a second hand 1L PC these days. They are expensive and notorious for screwing SD cards.
To put it into perspective, an 8GB raspberry pi with a 32GB SD card and cable but no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse is 251GBP. 35% the price of a macbook neo.
A MacBook Neo is 699 GBP. An 8GB Raspberry Pi w/ 32GB SD card, cable, housing, fan and power supply from Kiwi Electronics is 188 EUR (160 GBP). A monitor, kb/mouse, and SD card from Newegg is 70 USD (45 GBP). Total 205 GBP, which is 70.7% cheaper than a MacBook Neo. Quite a discount!
I gave you prices from UK sellers for all of them. You gave me three different currencies which suggests you're picking and choosing, and ignoring taxes. Probably because newegg in the UK doesn't sell them anymore.
You're also implying that Kiwi Electronics sell an 8GB raspberry pi 5 with SD card, housing, cable, power supply and fan for 5 euros less than they sell an 8GB raspberry pi 5 without any of those things: https://www.kiwi-electronics.com/en/raspberry-pi-5-computers...
> Total 205 GBP, which is 70.7% cheaper than a MacBook Neo. Quite a discount!
With 85% less storage, and nowhere near as powerful. The idea that a raspberry pi is worth a third a macbook, do you really believe that?
The raspberry pi's day as cheap hobbyist computing has long gone.
This. You're paying for various forms of documentation and support. If you don't need that, there are cheaper (e.g. Orange Pi) or better (1L, thin client) options.
>Local maximalists like to imagine a world where everything is aligned with their own personal incentives, but then present this world as being filled with freedom and choices. Just not anyone else's freedom or choices, only their own.
Just put a 'warranty void when removed' frangible sticker on it. Seems to work fine for PCs.
But so many people these days seem to be brainwashed into accepting that computing devices should come with soldered RAM and locked bootloaders, they probably can't even envisage how hardware used to be. Yes, modding my device voided the warranty and I didn't care. Freedom has a cost.
Pis aren't supposed to be for ultra-advanced users, they're even specifically marketed for kids. They're not gonna know if they got a bootlegged version or not.
Ok, and so that trade then means Raspberry Pis don't exist, because the conditions are such that the company doesn't have the incentive to produce the device in a way that makes sense to them.
Congrats, you now live in a world where you are theoretically free to swamp the RAM on a device that never got made.
Also tone down the freedom sob story: if you don't like the limitations of this device, buy a different one. Your "freedoms" are not at risk just because this small company trying to put out an affordable device is making trade-offs to protect the vast majority of their customers (who will never swap the RAM chips on their board) at the expense of a small minority who wants to do a thing their product is not intended for.
> As they clearly explained, giving you the choice to swap the RAM chips would create broader systemic problems that would lead to bad customer experiences and a support burden for their organization.
I can swap RAM on my laptop. What broader systemic problems beyond missed opportunities for more shareholder value (at the expense of everything else) does it create?
> a support burden for their organization.
What? I thought the seller is responsible for what they sell? Don't we have things like brands and trust or authorized sellers?
Yes I have read the forum post and discussions here before commenting.
I can fall victim to scams if I willingly take the risk and buy something cheaper than official authorized sellers offer. Thanks to this risk I haven't yet lost all my brain cells or critical thinking yet.
But if I do, I can always complain about pretty much everything to Raspberry Pi which'd undoubtedly increase support burden for them since they apparently can use AI or post copy-paste responses only when it's not the user complaining (or they just complain about locked hardware = no support burden then, these complaints are ok).
Doesn't me losing my brain due to corporations treating me like a toddler count as a broader systemic risk to you? Probably not, but how about me AND YOU losing consumer choice?
Swapping RAM chips on a board is something a tiny minority of customers would want to do.
Giving that tiny minority that freedom, at the expense of opening up the vast majority of other customers to potential problems, is a dumb choice to make (IMO), which is why they didn't make it.
On the topic of choice, perhaps YOU could choose to buy a thing that does what you want, rather than expecting every product to cater to your needs, regardless of whether it makes sense for it to do so or not.
By themelves or in general? If it's the latter, it's because currently rpi offers relatively fair pricing. If they started charging 10x that amount, more would be interested in 3rd party upgrades..
> at the expense of opening up the vast majority of other customers to potential problems
Who forces you to take the risk and buy from a 3rd party supplier at a cheaper price? You did not address my point about trust, brands and reputation handling these problems for years.
> On the topic of choice, perhaps YOU could choose to buy a thing that does what you want
That's precisely why I care. I'm not taking away your ability to buy original products from authorized sellers.
But you accepting ever increasing enshittification and contempt for the consumer, paired with the economics of scale means that I'll lose my choice soon, as those companies will learn consumers are mostly fine with being screwed like that.
I'll be hit first, yes. But when they go so far that you'll start to complain, it'll be too late because no consumer friendly alternatives will exist on the market by then, thanks to economics of scale and extremely weak antitrust enforcement.
All of the above arguments rely on very unlikely hypotheticals and unrealistic assumptions, sorry.
10x price increases? RPi will have bigger problems than "people want to re-solder new RAM chips on our boards" if that happens. Ironically the amount of competition in this space would put them out of business if they did that.
As for third-party sellers, it's pretty clear to me, if not to you, that the issue is not people knowingly buying from third-parties but rather un-knowingly doing so. The self-evidence of this should be apparent based on what RPi is choosing to do (being the ones with all the data on this).
The entire e-commerce industry is now fragmented with tens of thousands of sellers, huge third-party marketplaces (where it's hard to even tell who you are actually buying from), and online stores that constantly come and go.
You cannot manage counterfeit concerns through "brand and reputation handling" alone. That ship sailed so long ago we don't even know where it is anymore.
> "ever increasing enshittification and contempt for the consumer"
You're making a ridiculous leap here by equating the above with one small company making a pragmatic choice to protect its business and consumers.
I believe in customer choice and I do think it's important to protect it, but I'm not a selfish maximalist who thinks it should be done to my benefit at all cost and in ways that are not realistic or economically feasible for the other parties involved.
That nuance is sorely lacking from your position here.
> Ironically the amount of competition in this space would put them out of business if they did that.
You answered it on your own. The amount they can increase their margins by depends on things such as competition, barrier to entry et al. By convincing your customers that "it's all for your good", they can increase their margins making it harder to compete for those not employing these practices. Eventually we might end up with just a few players in the market like in the DRAM space, and then they absolutely can increase their margins by such amounts..
> As for third-party sellers, it's pretty clear to me, if not to you, that the issue is not people knowingly buying from third-parties but rather un-knowingly doing so.
This is getting hilarious.. batteries in smartphones can be replaced, does that mean when I go to store.google.com or motorola.com (and choose one of their retailers) I can buy a product with unoriginal battery? Wow, why haven't those evil stealth 3p sellers figured it out yet? Such a great evil business model!
(or maybe battery prices haven't increased by such amounts that manufacturers wanted to sneak their margin increase by blaming rising battery costs?)
> The entire e-commerce industry is now fragmented with tens of thousands of sellers, huge third-party marketplaces (where it's hard to even tell who you are actually buying from), and online stores that constantly come and go. You cannot manage counterfeit concerns through "brand and reputation handling" alone. That ship sailed so long ago we don't even know where it is anymore.
Relying on brands and reputation is precisely what I'm doing when buying electronics. Successfully. If you can't do it on your own, perhaps you might also want to contact some humans (those people who provide real answers instead of copy-paste corporate non-responses), this is how my relatives avoid falling for scams. By trusting humans, not for-profit corporations.
These things don’t matter to buyers. When the board doesn’t work right or crashes a lot they don’t care which step in their personal supply chain is at fault. They demand the original manufacturer give them a new one for free, which they believe is the terms of the warranty.
In the GitHub issue posted as another comment it's clear that what has happened is:
- 8GB Pi is out of stock / too expensive - due to RAM shortage
- Someone bought a load of non-8GB Pis
- Replaced the RAM with whatever they could get their hands on (cheap enough to be worth the hassle, cheap because no one else wants it even given the ongoing shortage - so probably pretty suspicious / of dubious quality)
- The end user buys it and has no idea it has been modified and the warranty is void
- RPi probably don't want to spend their time supporting it. Probably can't if the memory is a load of crap, even if they wanted to. It gets bricked.
The point here is someone bought something else (a fake pi) than they thought they were getting. Not that someone willingly wanted to go hacking.
It's not Pi's responsibility to police what people do with devices after the devices are sold. If bootleggers are modifying the devices and reselling fraudulent versions, that's between the buyer and the bootlegger and marketplace site where the second transaction happened.
What a world we live in that hot air reworking RAM on a SBC makes any sense. I can kind of understand shanzhai GPUs to get around export restrictions, but RPis?
I would agree except we still live in a world where making a few dollars more a day is a perfectly valid way to make money in alot of places. A bunch of guys in some electronic sweatshop in Vietnam or Indonesia working on pis is a reality.
Maybe your frame of reference is wrong. It makes perfect sense when you have a society with overproduction of people with STEM skills, overcapacity in manufacturing, and has ~18-20% youth unemployment.
Why they want or don't want something doesn't matter at all.
There is always a reason someone does any bad thing. There is always obviously some advantage to the perpetrator.
The fact they are only reacting to some other bad actions doesn't excuse it because there are any number of ways to to react. This way is the one way they chose when they have infinity to choose from.
I seriously doubt that is any more than a theoretical problem, and even if it isn't, so what? People start a warranty claim, send the boards to RPi, they run diagnostics, detect the changed RAM and deny the claim.
The codec unlock is a thing of the past pretty much, they dropped the affected hardware decoders entirely in the Pi4/5 [1]. In any case, if the legends of Pis being genuinely affordable options back then are true, I'm fine with it. A lot of (probably most) use-cases don't require these codecs, so paying $1.20 and $2.40 respectively seems reasonable for those who do need it.
The legends are true. I remember begging my parents to get me a Raspberry Pi sometime in the mid 2010s, and the cheap model was US$25 (and the less-cheap model was $35).
Admittedly, this may be closer to $40-50 in today's money (and didn't include an SD card, but those were more common back then in the era of digital cameras)...
The codecs at least had a reasonable explanation - it took a few dollars off the price of the unit (licensing fees to Microsoft and the like). There was also nothing stopping you from decoding MPEG2 with ffmpeg on the CPU. Those specific codecs aren't even present on newer Pi units.
> raspberrypi locked and limited conversation to collaborators
Way to read the room, jfc. Hardbricking hardware is not the answer, see FTDI.
I get why they are doing that... but I think there should be a way for users to flash a separate firmware, maybe tied to the hardware key similar to the old h264/mpeg license, that allows the usage of a modified board.
PS: Arrest Sam Altman who caused all of this mess in the first place with his market manipulation stunt.
There were sellers buying the smallest RAM units, changing the RAM chips, and then reselling them as the higher RAM SKUs. The sellers who do this don’t always care to use good RAM chips and may even use QA reject parts. When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi foundation.
The user friendly option would be to print the amount of RAM in very large letters on the PCB. There happens to be a lot of suitable surface on the PCB to the right of the text "Raspberry Pi 5" on the PCB anyway (§). Right now the amount of RAM is hard to read and easy to modify (move a little tiny SMD resistor).
Drawback: You need different silkscreens for different amounts of RAM.
Btw, if you're worried about RAM-swapped units you can already verify them as described at https://geekworm.com/blogs/news/prevent-ram-swapped-raspberr...
--
(§) as can be seen here https://pip-assets.raspberrypi.com/categories/1129-pcn/docum...
A little bit of acetone and a q-tip will remove the silkscreen, and then the PCB can easily re-marked by the scammer. Having a new silkscreen made is pocket change.
Etch it in the top layer of copper, cover it with soldermask. A bit harder to see, but harder to tamper.
Put a sticker over it. Sure, the PCB says 2GB, the sticker says 8GB, it was sold as 8GB, how many buyers are going to dig in and really understand what's going on?
That's still trivial to defeat. They're very capable and determined. In the olden days they used to mill the top of microprocessor ie intel x86 to remove the engraving and engrave the fake label. These days I imagine it's way more advanced
That is in no way trivial.
One way of doing it... You can blast away the original markings / copper using laser and put something in place like sheet of copper or something that resembles copper, add solder mask layer on top. Done.
These operations are not hobbyist level, they have access to the machinery to make it trivial.
Please, I could just fill the gap with the same-colored solder mask, flatten it out, cure it, you'd never see the rework.
It is so trivial anyone that's ever done fingernail polish can do it. The process is roughly the same.
No, this is not sufficient, since it would still allow you to swap to shite ram of the same size. This is an age-old problem for counterfeits. The ink on the chip/PCB isn't worth anything. The only way to actually catch this is to do a IQC that runs a full RAM test and hope that if you can't see a difference in performance (throughput, BER, timings, etc), then the chip is correct, with a bit of periodic de-lidding for anything suspicious/sampled. Then, if you can afford it, you blacklist the vendors that are caught changing things.
They also added a bit of internal ink, which is worth just a little more:
> we now also program in some other device attributes, meaning that switching parts of the same size may not work.
Working with vendors in China is entirely adversarial (mostly because their supply chain is vulnerable too), at this scale.
it can be very easily done by burning it with laser on prepared blank box on silkscreen - even iPhones are marked this way with their own serial numbers
the only reason why pis are not marked this way is because raspberry didn't wanted to (so far)
Embedding it on the board won't work. Fraudsters are really good at doctoring chip and board makings nowadays, even below the solder mask. It's hard to imagine as a westerner, but the necessary equipment to do that kind of thing is trivially available in most of east Asia.
On-chip fuses would be a good solution. Which, of course, is already what they're using to lock chips to specific memory. There's just not a good reason to brick the board when the memory doesn't match. Have the firmware flash a warning on the screen before boot. Problem solved.
Just make the RAM mismatch a warning that voids warranty rather than a hard error. This is no excuse for forcing hardware pairing
That won't stop scammers from reselling modified boards.
But it will make triage for both the user and RPi Foundation trivial, which is the actual problem they're trying to solve here.
...unless the goal really is locking boards to stock memory configurations.
Mac Minis used to have soldered on SSDs, but the 2024 model is upgradable. A lot of people purchased a cheaper Mac Mini and upgraded the storage themselves. Most people would argue this is a good thing, even if some of those Mac Minis were resold. This is no different.
> Mac Minis used to have soldered on SSDs, but the 2024 model is upgradable. A lot of people purchased a cheaper Mac Mini and upgraded the storage themselves. Most people would argue this is a good thing, even if some of those Mac Minis were resold. This is no different.
Replacing a socketed component that is modular by design, even if it's not officially intended to be upgraded outside the factory, is worlds different from replacing BGA components on a densely packed PCB.
That said, there could also be a middle ground by just providing some way to look up the hardware specs of a given serial number. Post the part numbers of the components that you're concerned about being replaced and provide tools to verify as many of them through software as is practical. Allow owners to know if their device has been modified and how so, but allow them to choose what to do with that information.
Combating fraudsters trying to pass off modified and/or refurbished devices as genuine is valid, but preventing owners from modifying or repairing their own or knowingly purchasing such devices from honest resellers is not.
This is very different. The Raspberry Pi 5 RAM upgrades are arbitrage, involving soldering on dodgy RAM, at the expense of the unsuspecting retail buyer vs. people upgrading their own Mac Minis for themselves and without any soldering.
It absolutely is different. You just said the Mac Mini is upgradable but the Pi is still soldered on. Desoldering and soldering a new RAM unit carries huge risks no matter how skilled people claim they are at it.
> It absolutely is different. You just said the Mac Mini is upgradable but the Pi is still soldered on.
I'm sorry, you seem to be confused. Soldering is not the problem. Locking up the hardware to have hardware provisioned tier limits to block you from upgrading your own hardware is silly.
And do note, raspberry pi doesn't prevent you from switching RAM chips. The board will continue to work just the same with high capacity variants. But for some reason raspberry pi hardcodes a max memory size that prevents you from using the hardware upgrade you paid for in full.
> There were sellers buying the smallest RAM units, changing the RAM chips, and then reselling them as the higher RAM SKUs
That’s awesome. If it’s economical to do, it’s clearly good for consumers.
> The sellers who do this don’t always care to use good RAM chips and may even use QA reject parts.
That’s clearly on the sellers.
> When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi foundation
That’s a bit of a conjecture and easily solved in ways that preserve user freedom.
But bricking retroactively in the field is a bad move, and sends even more anger and RMA requests back towards parties.
https://github.com/therealdreg/ftdibrick
Pepperidge Farm remembers the FTDI driver bricking.
gateway 3ds tried to brick 3ds-es of users of cloned cards, bricked whole swaths of actual users instead
https://www.eurogamer.net/3ds-flashcard-includes-secret-kill...
It's not bricked retroactively from what I've read.
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
If someone gets updated in the wild (like this person did without realizing they had a counterfeit board), they'll fail to boot.
Consider that that happened a year ago and this submission may be about the fix.
The "fix" in the thread is just not updating ever again.
There is no fix that can be suggested in that thread. Pi LTD doesn't have the modified RAM Pis to test their firmware against nor should they be required to support modified hardware.
The fix is turning the detection of the modified ram from a boot failure into a warning and log output, then tell users asking for support that they don't have support for Pis that were modified by third parties.
Instead we get restrictions on all users because some users buy stuff from random marketplaces online?
I don't know why you're suggesting the fix is that they offer support for 3rd modded RAM.
>I don't know why you're suggesting the fix is that they offer support for 3rd modded RAM.
I'm not.
Oh no, there were bad actors on the market, let's lock the hardware so cheaper but genuine options can't emerge.
> When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi
It's not their problem then, the seller is responsible for it and I think we can assume the user has a brain so they knew they could buy a more expensive option from the authorized sellers. Isn't this the case?
> "we can assume the user has a brain"
Dangerous assumption there. I'm not just being cynical, that is decades of experience speaking.
> When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi foundation.
They don't need the resellers help for that! I've already been burned twice thinking "I'll use a raspberry pi for this small project" and having it die within a month because reliably reading/writing to an SD card is hard or something.
Between the notorious unreliability, crazy price hikes, trademark or whatever disputes, and this anti consumer ewaste generating policy, I can't think of any reason I'd ever patronize them again.. my only regret is it took me two purchases to learn this lesson!
The much easier and more reasonable solution here would be for the RPi Foundation to ignore RMA requests for boards not bought from them or an authorized reseller.
Painful that the RPi higher memory versions are so crazy overpriced that made the RAM swap, an obviously expensive process, meaningful. The solution of ofcourse would be to have market prices that are meaningful rather than trying to retain the overpricing moat through sabotage.
Has this allegation been substantiated?
The person in the forum thread claimed to be repairing CM5s and CM4s. Unusual but it seems like an otherwise hyper reactive response by the RPi Foundation. Something you wouldn’t batt an eye at if it were Apple instead.
could it be construed as anti-competitive to block end-users or resellers from swapping RAM?
Probably not.
Doing a RAM swap and then selling the resulting unit as if it were a Raspberry Pi of the higher RAM capacity might be construed as trademark infringement[0]. And in general it's fairly difficult to make arguments in antitrust cases that boil down to "yes, your honor, everything they're doing is within their rights but I don't like it".
[0] At the same time, the scammers could probably get away with this by putting "Upgraded to 16GB!" in the title of their eBay listings or whatever, in the same way that fraudulent storage devices are labeled as "upgraded" (read: lying about their capacity). That doesn't impact the antitrust analysis though.
I certainly agree that such a reseller should clearly state the modification, and not pretend its an authentic RPi 8GB unit.
But if this is the real concern, they could just display the fact that "Unoriginal RAM detected" to inform the user its not a vanilla RPi Foundation product, so buyers understand the situation, but continue booting normally.
In practice, this would still leave the RPi Foundation with the warranty and support burden generated by the "reseller's" activity.
For every user asking questions and facing issues for such-or-such firmware or software support they need in their projects, that same user would have appeared regardless if their Pi came from RP directly or through a reseller.
Every board sold would have been an extra user, the reseller isn't adding full users (although they may increase the indirect customer base!), so even gaining a user through a reseller increases the amortization divider for the support burden.
Now lets consider RAM chip support burden, the original Pi RAM chips can have issues generating support burden, and so can the reseller RAM chips. Unless RP foundation refuses to upstream link training / RAM bringup patches from resellers, there is no real additional support burden.
In fact if RP were a little more creative, they could have tried contacting the resellers to explain they can continue their modding business as long as they advertise it clearly as modified, and to inform them they will be receiving units that didn't pass the RAM tests from the automated lines, since they're going to desolder the chips anyway, this can save costs for RP foundation.
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No. Price discrimination and locking hardware are not illegal.
lets try proof by exhaustion:
in those jurisdictions where either price discrimination or locking hardware are not illegal, it is typically perfectly legal to reverse engineer for compatibility purposes. So nothing prevents such resellers from upping their game and learning a thing or two about link training and general SDRAM bringup.
Once they have acquired the knowledge legally in such jurisdictions the product just flows in the other jurisdictions anyway.
Courts upheld the monopolistic position of microsoft etc. for decades, but respect has no finality, "re" + "spect" to review, so later such companies were fined for their decades long transgressions.
But during those decades it may appear legal to the average consumer.
Inaction is not permission.
All of this is pretty irrelevant from a legal perspective.
Reverse engineering is legal, but manufacturers don’t have to help you figure out how to reverse engineer their products and they’re allowed to design their products in a way that makes it difficult.
There’s generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like hardware lockdowns of this nature illegal, especially for companies that are not in regulated industries or are not monopoly/oligopoly players.
> All of this is pretty irrelevant from a legal perspective.
> Reverse engineering is legal, but manufacturers don’t have to help you figure out how to reverse engineer their products and they’re allowed to design their products in a way that makes it difficult.
I'm not asking for help to figure this out, and of course RP is allowed to shoot themselves in any foot they like.
Consider Europe where such reverse engineering is perfectly legal for compatibility purposes. Let's consider an idealized scenario, there were no security bugs or other issues with the product that would justify reverse engineering RP blobs in public. When they do something like this, they are GIVING CARTE BLANCHE to public reverse engineering efforts to attain compatibility with other RAM chips. Why would you provide legal cover in some jurisdictions for others in publicly reverse engineering your own products by introducing artificial incompatibility?
Also from a consumer perspective, RP tries to place itself front and center in maker communties, emphasizing modularity, not just hobbyists, also companies build and design end products using RP units. All of these companies must now be wondering where RP Foundations exact red line resides: can we resell an RP board in a Kiosk we made? or only for as long as it doesn't compete with RP's future Kiosk modules? Today its the RAM upgrade, but tomorrow RP modules may refuse to boot some popular Kiosk hardware intentionally. What prevents RP Foundation from eventually "not copying" end-application hardware like a Kiosk design from their customers, and then enforcing compatibility only with RP Kiosks?
So not only are they providing legal cover for public reverse engineering efforts, they are scaring part of their customer base.
> There’s generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like hardware lockdowns of this nature illegal, especially for companies that are not in regulated industries or are not monopoly/oligopoly players.
That's a very shallow interpretation of law, looking only at what RP is or isn't allowed to do.
There's generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like reverse engineering for compatibility or security applications illegal either.
I think you’re overestimating the peril RP puts itself in here.
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Lots of things aren't illegal... unless you do them for illegal purposes.
I doubt antitrust would get anywhere on this RAM issue, but antitrust law is not defined in terms of either of those categories.
You'd be well advised to remember there is a world beyond your visible horizon.
I prefer to stay grounded in the reality of how the world works when responding to questions about legalities.
What you said isn't true for quite a few countries.
That's quite possible, but could you name a couple where locking a raspberry pi type of computer would be illegal?
EU Right to Repair Directive specifically prohibits manufacturers from using HW/SW locks or firmware limits to block part replacement.
The part replacement isn't being blocked? The OP's CM5 with replaced RAM is still a working CM5 according to him. And fully functional compared to before the replacement.
The part can be replaced with the same part to repair the item. This is not locked.
Part locking against unoriginal parts is prohibited in the EU.
"Each chip is programmed with the timing settings and storage size settings of just the RAM we ship it with, and doesn't know how to boot with anything else." I don't know if you could call that "blocking." I mean you could call it that but I don't know if that's legally what it would be.
So European institution following this discussion would be wise to ASAP formally request RP Foundation to describe it either as a blocking security mechanism, or just a compatibility issue.
Between current inaction and eventual action, it settles the position of RP foundation, so they can't switch back and forth between "these people are circumventing security" vs "its just an unintended incompatibility", as long as they don't reveal their position its neither here nor there.
Should just print "warranty void on unauthorized RAM", instead of not booting
It does boot.
What if the manufacturer charged no markup on RAM price, wouldn't it make "illegal upgrading" pointless because they couldn't compete on price? The manufacturer buys RAM in bulk and has better pricing.
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Curiously NVIDIA have long allowed consumer GPUs to be upgraded with larger memory chips - they could very easily reject booting those configurations. This is something done almost exclusively by unsavory Chinese actors who then sell on the bare retail PCBs (core removed, since they use different PCBs and heatsinks) to various scammers that foist them upon unsuspecting retail buyers.
In short, someone at NVIDIA really hates retail, but loves Chinese sanction busters.
I think they should instead just introduce a clear system for verifying that a Raspberry Pi is genuine. For example, a code printed directly on the device. If you enter that code on the website, you can see exactly which model it belongs to and how often it has been used. That way, you could determine whether a Raspberry Pi is new or used and whether it has been modified. I saw that once at a thermal paste manufacturer. They used it to solve the problem of counterfeit thermal paste.You just have to get people to actually use the system and tell anyone else who asks for support but doesn't have an original copy to GTFO.This would allow them to avoid the increased support burden without limiting people's ability to upgrade their Raspberry Pi.
Chinese scammers have gotten good at abusing those "codes" by having a list of "known good" codes and printing them on multiple units. And because those holographic codes some companies used are printed in China, the scammers just use the same equipment during the night shift.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/microsd-card-failure...
There are methods of doing so that identify multiple, harder to falsify things.
One that I have seen is HMAC(serial||SKU) as a datamatrix/QR, laser-etched onto the top silkscreen and burned into a PROM.
Just show everyone who looks up the code how often the code has already been checked. If you get a new product but the code has been checked 628 times, it’s probably a reused code.
Package the product with a low denomination paper currency, lookup based on the banknote's serial number.
fun fact is that some chinese electronics manufacturers do exactly that with their products (even simple ones like led night lights), holographic qr-code on box that can be scanned and verified without opening box and second code inside box to verify box wasn't swapped
The real story here is that people are selling modded Pis as higher-memory versions. And this check actually caught them + is circumventable. The restriction is somewhat annoying to a small subset of enthusiasts but seems to catch genuine fraud.
If it's circumventable, how does it prevent fraud? Seems like it would likely just hurt the enthusiasts.
You can already check whether the RAM has been swapped via https://geekworm.com/blogs/news/prevent-ram-swapped-raspberr....
> Unfortunately, some unscrupulous sellers swap the RAM modules of low-capacity models to pass them off as high-capacity ones for illegal profits
What the fuck are they talking about?
I feel like a genuine fraudster would know those circumventions while an enthusiast (who BOUGHT the device) would be hurt.
> The restriction is somewhat annoying to a small subset of enthusiasts but seems to catch genuine fraud.
What fraud are you speaking of?
The memory that they are placing in it has to be cheap enough to be worth their while. Which in this climate is highly probably faulty memory, or memory that runs at a different speed/spec to the one advertised to come with the RPi. That is fraud.
Yeah, I'm split on this because
1: I think people should be able to replace chips on an RPi as they desire, so I don't love that they're actively preventing this
2: As a buyer, I absolutely want to know if I'm buying an RPi that has had chips replaced
3: A shady seller changing the SKU to mimic a better board after changing chips is just flat out fraud.
---
It's the classic "Mattress tag" case - it should be illegal to remove as a seller, and fine as the final customer.
But that's really hard to functionally enforce.
Absolutely agree.
It's unfortunate, but given that there are so many ways you could end up with a poor quality knock-off (i.e. Amazon, sorry, 'third party marketplaces') it's probably something that skews the tradeoff quite significantly.
I guess there are more individuals who will be upset when they can't run something on their equipment as it was advertised to them than will be upset that they can't re-solder the RAM.
There are probably even fewer individuals who'll do due diligence in their own supply chain. Whilst those that suffer are technically suffering from some kind of crime / civil wrong - the chance of them getting a remedy for this is going to be non-existent.
Given the how overpriced the high RAM models sold by the RPi foundation are, I think they just can use good RAM and still make a nice profit. Like you know RPi foundation could, if they were not greedy.
Selling a modified device is not fraud.
> The memory that they are placing in it has to be cheap enough to be worth their while.
You're framing this as if no reputable vendor is willing or able to source cheaper parts.
If they can get a better deal in more RAM, why can't they upgrade the boards? As a consumer, doesn't that benefit you as well?
> Which in this climate is highly probably faulty memory, (...)
That's specious reasoning and blatant fear-mongering. Consumer protection laws require vendors to support their products. If RAM is faulty, whether it was hand soldered by Eben Upton himself or hacked from a Soviet fridge, vendors are compelled to support customers. This means vendors ultimately have an interest in minimizing faulty equipment, because it hurts their bottom line.
So why can't people have the right to upgrade their hardware? I thought we already went through this battle in the 1980s.
Raspberry pi never sold them this product. Some random person is the vendor selling some unknown modification and isn’t providing support.
Sure - if that vendor was proposing a solution, a modified EEPROM perhaps, then all is dandy. But they aren’t.
A reputable vendor resells a product they've modified as unmodified?
> A reputable vendor resells a product they've modified as unmodified?
I wouldn't mind buying a 16GB board even though the official models at most ship with 8gb.
I'd even wouldn't mind buying the kit and taking a stab at resoldering it myself.
I mean, think about it. what is the whole point of a raspberry pi?
Even if you might not, why would your opinion prevent others from doing what they want with their hardware?
So buy from a vendor that offers the 16GB modification and runs their own hardware support.
You can still solder your own 16GB and you can do your own support.
Maybe if the Rasp Pi was an unassembled kit "the whole point" would make sense.
You can do what ever you want with your hardware. Have fun. Other people don't have to support you.
This is classic gaslighting technique corporations use to extract more profit. Modifications or upgrades made by small business = fraud, OEM selling different SKUs = legitimate business.
Don't fall for it.
If a small business is modifying the product and not telling the eventual customer they've done so how is that not fraud? I don't want to buy a Raspberry Pi with a memory chip from who knows who which might have not passed QA modified by people who may or may not do a decent job at soldering it to the board.
Complete nonsense. RPi has not even given evidence of their claims.
Selling a unit as something that it's not.
A unit that rpi themselves sold with 8g is different than a unit that someone else modified. The reworked unit is not sold with the disclosure that it has been hacked and no longer covered by any warranty, and the memory installed is of totally unknown provenance and quality, timing specs, failed qa, etc. Even the simple process of heating everything up to desolder & resolder temps is not free, it degrades everything, the pcb itself, the epoxy holding the traces and pads down, and all the components, and means higher chance of some failure happening sooner than it would have. But it's sold as a real rpi unit for real rpi price or a little less to beat real ones.
That is the fraud they speak of.
You should be free to do this to your unit if you like of course, and rpi has infinite other possible ways they could have chosen to address the problem and didn't have to do it this way. I'm only saying there is actually a problem.
Selling modded board as official 8GB SKU with reliability/warranty expectations.
Whether it’s fraud depends heavily on how it’s sold.
If it’s represented as a new product or offered with manufacturer’s warranty, that would cross into fraud.
> Whether it’s fraud depends heavily on how it’s sold.
Only as far as new vs refurbished goes.
But that's not the problem being addressed, is it? I mean, why can't I upgrade it myself?
I certainly don’t say this with the implication that I would do what RPi did if I was in their shoes or that I agree with it, but the answer to your question is “you probably can upgrade it yourself but you just haven’t figured out how to.”
Just like the idea that you “can’t” rip a Blu-ray Disc was only a matter of time and energy to thwart.
I also don’t think this device is one that has ever been sold with the expectation that it would be upgraded. It is (or was) a cheap single board computer.
Like it’s kind of funny to me how this is becoming a controversy among people who probably didn’t even think raspberry pi memory could be replaced in any semblance of an economically sensible way as of yesterday.
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If they can block it, they should be able to warn about it with an opt-in option.
Is there a way to circumvent it other than use ancient firmware?
> but seems to catch genuine fraud.
In what way this is fraudulent if device works as described?
No different than upgrading a PC and then selling it. You don't call it fraud.
The fraud is not disclosing what you did. It's passing off a third-party mod as an original part.
Evidence that it is happening or is it RasberryPi gaslighting?
If someone sells RPi with 16GB and the RAM is working fine, then why would that be fraud?
If someone buys e.g. Dell PC, then adds 16GB of ram and sells it at 32GB without mentioning they put extra 16GB, is it a fraud?
That's ridiculous.
I don't know if it's happening or not, but that's the claim.
They just want to cash in on high memory prices and prevent people from saving money.
This. It's obvious.
I love how we think we own our hardware, but secretly we don't. Surprised though that even a Raspberry Pi now thinks this as well. They grew big _because_ of tinkering...
Doesn't matter. At the current RPI prices is just better to buy a mini PC or any of the alternative SBC like the orange pi.
Reading through the EEPROM repo issue[1] makes me a little more sympathetic to the "feature", but I still don't like it at all.
It might help in the short term to stop dodgy resellers who mod the boards with cheap upgraded RAM to make a buck or two...
But the Pi itself is always taking one step forward, one step back in terms of firmware. I've been tinkering with some Qualcomm boards from Radxa and things are slightly better there, though you don't have anywhere near the ecosystem you get with Pi (or onboarding niceties).
[1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
I am incredibly unsympathetic to statements like the first reply to the issue "This sounds like a hardware issue. Please can you contact the reseller for a refund." from the "Software Engineering Manager at Raspberry Pi, working on firmware, bootloader, security and low-level Linux software." (Read: I suspect this person knew exactly what happened here)
If the reply was along the lines of "This is a new firmware check to curb fraud related to undisclosed aftermarket RAM upgrades with potentially unreliable chips." - I'd be fine with it, but basically just coming out to gaslight the user about the issue leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. In the end, they had to come clean anyway, big surprise.
I say this as someone who has been loving Pis despite their price for the straightforward and reliable long-term software support. Not gonna pretent like I'll never buy a Pi again, but it's another strike moving me to explore other options in the future.
>(Read: I suspect this person knew exactly what happened here)
Yes they knew everything about how training DDR4 RAM works, they knew everything including that the seller doesn't know how their training code works and bailed out and no longer exists but still got paid and that it was worth it for the reseller.
One thing I like here is Raspberry Pi still lets engineers have interactions with end users like this (despite them not doing the best PR all the time).
Really? I found that issue and all of the related ones really disingenuous from the Pi folks; they just stonewalled everyone with "contact your hardware seller" rather than explaining what was going on even at the glossed-over level they managed in the forum thread.
I do feel for them; they're between a rock and a hard place with mis-labeled clone boards. But their implementation seems to be the most hostile and opaque possible way to achieve these goals (which I also understand from an anti-cloning standpoint, but especially anymore, it's going to get reversed anyway).
I dunno - I think the victims in a lot of these cases aren't stupid. They can't contact the seller because they bought it from 'some guy' who's disappeared into the night. They know they've been had and are trying to get a knock-off board working at the expense of [the time of] someone completely unrelated to this.
It's pretty normal for the first port of call / warranty claim for a busted item to be the dealer that sold it to you.
I absolutely agree that engaging with these people beyond "we added checks to ensure your board has the RAM it came with, and this one failed" is a waste of time, but I think that at least providing that level of response would be much more aligned with the image they're still trying to project than just stonewalling entirely.
"We bricked your board on purpose even though it actually might work fine" isn't good image either. Like, they know they are doing a bad thing!
It's not bricked.
Very fair point.
I think the bigger problem is that this was pushed as a firmware update, bricking previously working devices.
Remember when FTDI did this and suddenly medical equipment at some hospital stopped working?
It would be much more user friendly if there was a way to check the serial of a particular PI and see it's original hardware config, manufacture date, and so on.
In practice, nobody will.
The people who RMA will if you make it part of the submission process
Raspberry Pi is going down the way iRobot did, succumbing to pressure from chinese players like radxa or orange pi.
Sad to see industry pioneers lose to players that copy them and undercut prices using cheap labor.
Why do you think they are going down? My impression is that their prices are actually good. Especially for CM4 compatible alternatives. They fab in China just like everybody else. Although they do some or all assembly (soldering) in UK I think.
My understanding is that Raspberry Pi differentiates itself primarily with software support, which is hard to duplicate trivially like a physical device.
> undercut prices using cheap labor
Its called competition. Should those „cheap labourers“ not have a job?
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So they applied this gate in the rpi EEPROM, which is closed source.
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
Who invests a few tokens finding the hardcoded check?
AFAIR the EEPROM mostly uses the VideoCore instruction set.
It feels like there could be a middle ground here where the Pi would show some annoying error message at boot that the RAM doesn't match the CPU's anticipated spec.
Any sellers caught doing this would quickly be flagged by the community as unreliable; also purchase protection is pretty strong these days.
like what Android shows when the bootloader is unlocked
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Yup. It’s almost like their stated goal doesn’t match their actions.
The Raspberry Pi was invented to be an accessible open platform that people could modify on their own terms, wasn’t it?
And then they got some capital injections and started caring more about the commercial side, didn’t they?
They have been doing this from almost the beginning - weird firmware/GPU blobs, camera interface hardware DRM, etc.
Money and greed has been at the first place from the beginning.
Maybe I’m being charitable, but my impression was that originally they only had access to non-open gpu chips and therefore were forced to have black-box gpu blobs
IIRC it was something like that & even if initially understandable, IIRC it did not really make sense to continue doing that once they were famous enough & had some money to work with (to e.g. pick a more open chip).
That that still have a closed source firmware, which makes it possible for them to pull off the bullshit discussed in the article & this discussion - that proves there was & still is a shady undertone under all that openness facade of the RPi foundation. :P
They frame this as fraud-prevention but I don't really buy it.
I think of I this way. As a casual/hobbyist user, maybe I'm happy to accept a 10% risk of the device failing prematurely in exchange for saving $20 on a memory upgrade. Ok, so these unscrupulous sellers will never tell me that info up-front...but this defective-by-design system doesn't help me either. The sellers playing this shady game might not accept returns (one example of this already in the github issue linked from the main thread) and there's no sign anything's wrong until you receive and boot up. So the user is left holding the bag, with kneecapped memory capacity, and the same stability risks anyway!
If these DRAM-upgraders are really so clever, they'll find a way to bypass this (patched firmware or hacked serial in the CPU). At least, it'll work until the user is out of the 30-day period when they finally update the firmware.
Or if the CPU/mainboard can really detect this in a non-defeatable manner, why cut the usable memory? Just print something to dmesg or stderr when the user logs in. "This device's memory has been modified and may be unstable, warranty blah blah"
Apple locks down fingerprint/camera module swaps, but at least there's a plausible (afaik) security rationale for it. Seems like Raspberry just got tired of being undercut on price.
If the ram chips pass proper testing, why should anyone care where they come from?
If RMA process includes hardware verification then rpi doesn’t get bled out by absorbing the cost of “counterfeits”
If they widely tell people what the market is doing and make all the tools public, they will offload the work of dealing with counterfeits while levelling up the tinkerers
Alright, what would it take to make a completely open source firmware for the pi? I think there was some prior effort that got discontinued...
Its a closed broadcom chip. Basically futile or heavily resource intensive to try.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49783849
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Raspberry_Pi_locks_RAM_upgrade...
Thanks a lot RPi foundation, now I know I can get your boards with more RAM without paying the insane prices in your greedy eshop! ;-)
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I like the Chromebook solution for tampering: allow people to go crazy but throw up a big scary warning on boot!
Raspberry Pis, save for RP silicon like rp2040, have always been locked down proprietary black boxes.
I bought it, if I want to use a tape drive for my RAM I will do that.
The way they price their RPi’s - are we even surprised there’s now a market for cheap modified Pi’s with more RAM?
They should make a form where you input the serial number and apply for a key, applying that key in config.txt disables the hardware verification checks on the bootrom.
What's causing the higher RAM prices that motivate RPi resellers to change RAM chips
I think this is really dumb and stupid. Not that I don't agree with their reasoning - it's actually very reasonable - but that I have a lot of distaste from "saving the customer from themselves" type antifeatures.
Practically speaking, though, this antifeature doesn't affect most people, because I don't think most people are willing to take a heat gun to a microsoldered part just to save a few bucks on RAM. If the RAM was socketed somehow - which at this scale and performance tier is not possible - then I'd probably be way angrier.
This is more "from successful fraudsters" than "from themselves".
hope this is a big wake up call to anyone that thinks rpi is remotely open
Why not just paint the original chips with some special ink that says VOID IF TAMPERED over the RAM chips and the board? Pretty much like other hardware manufacturers do with seals or stickers, wouldn't this solve the issue?
When your fraudsters have near OEM-level resources, perhaps not?
(To be clear, I don't know either way; I'm just assuming that this was contemplated at the time because it's easier)
If they can make it not work with 3rd party chips, they can make it have a internal tamper code instead. If the Chinese sellers can somehow remove the internal tamper code then they'd also be able to bypass the current lock, which they seem they can't.
This is pretty clearly just them trying to block resellers that mod their boards as that removes price pressure from them. It's end user hostile, full stop.
Rich of them to claim that "users will complain" when their platform is built for hobbiests and tinkerers. What a terrible stance.
> their platform is built for hobbiests and tinkerers
I don't think that's been true for a long time. Their main market is commercial users now - reference what happened with COVID shortages and RPi prioritizing nearly all of their capacity to commercial users, leaving tinkerers with little to no stock.
I'd imagine that will be for compute module, not the other SKUs ?
When there were shortages and they were rationing, they explicitly stated it was to protect their commercial customers. The shortages were across all SKUs, not limited to compute modules.
I think there's actually a lot of commercial use of the regular boards as well. Plenty of products for which a Pi is sufficiently capable and for which they can use something off-the-shelf rather than developing a custom PCB.
Maybe originally, I'm sure their larger market share is now the embedded market. The whole compute module thing.
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It's tough but I'd still wager that more hobbyists and tinkers will complain when their 8GB Pi that they bought from Amazon, or anywhere really, won't actually run their project that they wanted to use 8GB for properly because that 8GB is little more than a fiction.
They ought to complain to Amazon, then. They were sold one thing but delivered something else.
Yes.
Except linked in this exact discussion is a thread where the person is asking RPi for remedy instead because the seller has been unable to assist (i.e. has run off with their money).
I wish you'd be more specific on what link in a different thread you mean. This one? https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
That RAM is not fiction, it was working before they updated and worked again when they removed the update. It's failing verification, not failing to function.
"We do it to protect you and ensure our quality"
Nah, they got big enough and now you think you can pull Apple tricks, good luck with that.
It is not tjat well known, but this is not the first DRM bullshit from the RPi foundation - they played similar tricks with the camera interface, to force people to use their overpriced camera instead of better and cheaper third party ones.
> We therefore remove the commercial incentive by locking devices to their original RAM size.
Get fucked. Clearly you want to make all the profit and stop people from upgrading their devices.
We can't normalize this cash-grab user-hostile late stage capitalism bullshit.
Their argument assumes users are idiots - we had swappable components for years, and while there were cheating actors, market has invented things like brands and trust, you know? You don't have to buy models from the sellers you don't trust, nobody forces you to.
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I mean the Pi currently makes little to no sense to buy anyway. So locking down parts barely moves the needle. The value proposition is unbelievably bad at spending upwards of $423 CAD for a 16GB Raspberry Pi. Which is literally just the bare board.
The 2026 financial report is apparently this Thursday on Sept 24. So will see how this played out for them. Their stock is all over the place anyway with low float.
I think the Pi units have much higher margins on higher RAM versions plus RAM is expensive, so the 16GB is indeed a bad deal. For my workloads I heavily use all onboard peripeals, GPU and CPU, but need only 1GB RAM. So I get a good deal even compared to Chinese alternatives.
The Pi 5 16GB was regarded a bad deal *at launch* for ~$170 CAD lol! I don't think there are any use cases left that make sense.
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The pi is useful because it is well supported. Either buy a x86, or buy pi - anything else and good luck keeping it working. You need to plan on spending your time writing/maintain the drivers to keep your system working.
Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers.
I have at one point faced the “should I buy x86 instead”, and decided low-power Intel CPUs make it viable. Guess I’m gonna pick the x86.
The latest low power Intel is very nice. ARM beats it for doing nothing, but when getting things done things are more complex.
>> Either buy a x86, or buy pi - anything else and good luck keeping it working.
Disagree.
For example, Toradex i.MX8 is supported until 2035 and possibly beyond.
Maybe. Read the fine print of your contract closely. I am not familiar with that system, but my experience with boards like this is that they have "support", but often not in the mainline kernel, it is in patches that they apply to some yocto build and so you are always several years behind the latest kernel. You may also discover that the support doesn't cover some accessories and so you may not be able to upgrade if you want wifi to work. They will backport knows CVE fixes, but anything that was fixed without realizing it should be a CVE will never be back ported.
That level of vendor support is not exactly unusual, and is adequate for many commercial purposes.
It's fair to say that the Pi Foundation goes beyond the bare mminimum. But it's far from the only option for Linux on a SoC.
> Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers.
Reminds me of Adobe's history to be honest. They also were big on hooking the young to their ecosystem, including turning more than one blind eye towards piracy, and once they had a captive userbase plus a lack of competition, they enshittified.
you can buy a variety of pi models in the range of $50 to $15, so what?
That's quite disappointing. Whose hardware is it anyways? Yours, when you pay for it.
I find their explanation to be completely reasonable.
As they clearly explained, giving you the choice to swap the RAM chips would create broader systemic problems that would lead to bad customer experiences and a support burden for their organization.
You'd be ok with that trade?
Local maximalists like to imagine a world where everything is aligned with their own personal incentives, but then present this world as being filled with freedom and choices. Just not anyone else's freedom or choices, only their own.
The entire point of the RPi is the user can do whatever they want with it.
So no, it's not reasonable at all.
Buy an Apple product if you want what you're stating.
No, RPis are very inexpensive computers. What you're advocating would considerably increase the price of a Raspberry Pi to pay for the additional support burden (if this is even reasonable--should they hire a bunch of people just to answer "you bought a RPi w/ bootleg RAM" over and over again?), and that defeats the point.
> No, RPis are very inexpensive computers.
This hasn't been true for 5 or 6 years and there is very little reason to buy one over a second hand 1L PC these days. They are expensive and notorious for screwing SD cards.
To put it into perspective, an 8GB raspberry pi with a 32GB SD card and cable but no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse is 251GBP. 35% the price of a macbook neo.
A MacBook Neo is 699 GBP. An 8GB Raspberry Pi w/ 32GB SD card, cable, housing, fan and power supply from Kiwi Electronics is 188 EUR (160 GBP). A monitor, kb/mouse, and SD card from Newegg is 70 USD (45 GBP). Total 205 GBP, which is 70.7% cheaper than a MacBook Neo. Quite a discount!
I gave you prices from UK sellers for all of them. You gave me three different currencies which suggests you're picking and choosing, and ignoring taxes. Probably because newegg in the UK doesn't sell them anymore.
You're also implying that Kiwi Electronics sell an 8GB raspberry pi 5 with SD card, housing, cable, power supply and fan for 5 euros less than they sell an 8GB raspberry pi 5 without any of those things: https://www.kiwi-electronics.com/en/raspberry-pi-5-computers...
> Total 205 GBP, which is 70.7% cheaper than a MacBook Neo. Quite a discount!
With 85% less storage, and nowhere near as powerful. The idea that a raspberry pi is worth a third a macbook, do you really believe that?
The raspberry pi's day as cheap hobbyist computing has long gone.
> You gave me three different currencies which suggests you're picking and choosing, and ignoring taxes.
Even if I'm off by 100%, 410GBP is 41% less than 699. Quite a discount!
> The idea that a raspberry pi is worth a third a macbook, do you really believe that?
I think a lot more kids, etc. have 200 GBP than 700.
This. You're paying for various forms of documentation and support. If you don't need that, there are cheaper (e.g. Orange Pi) or better (1L, thin client) options.
The community is pretty good at that. The point of swapping RAM is to lower prices and it has clearly been successful at that.
They could have :
• etch the ram around on the board itself.
• provide a pre-RMA check so user can verify if their unit is genuine (serial number linked to ram amount)
• void warranty on resoldered board.
>Local maximalists like to imagine a world where everything is aligned with their own personal incentives, but then present this world as being filled with freedom and choices. Just not anyone else's freedom or choices, only their own.
Excellent comment, worth repeating, thanks
> You'd be ok with that trade?
Umm, yes...?
Just put a 'warranty void when removed' frangible sticker on it. Seems to work fine for PCs.
But so many people these days seem to be brainwashed into accepting that computing devices should come with soldered RAM and locked bootloaders, they probably can't even envisage how hardware used to be. Yes, modding my device voided the warranty and I didn't care. Freedom has a cost.
Pis aren't supposed to be for ultra-advanced users, they're even specifically marketed for kids. They're not gonna know if they got a bootlegged version or not.
> > You'd be ok with that trade?
> Umm, yes...?
Ok, and so that trade then means Raspberry Pis don't exist, because the conditions are such that the company doesn't have the incentive to produce the device in a way that makes sense to them.
Congrats, you now live in a world where you are theoretically free to swamp the RAM on a device that never got made.
Also tone down the freedom sob story: if you don't like the limitations of this device, buy a different one. Your "freedoms" are not at risk just because this small company trying to put out an affordable device is making trade-offs to protect the vast majority of their customers (who will never swap the RAM chips on their board) at the expense of a small minority who wants to do a thing their product is not intended for.
Wow look at those goalposts fly.
The occasional unlicensed and secret RAM upgrade isn't going to kill the business. It's also a small minority!
> As they clearly explained, giving you the choice to swap the RAM chips would create broader systemic problems that would lead to bad customer experiences and a support burden for their organization.
I can swap RAM on my laptop. What broader systemic problems beyond missed opportunities for more shareholder value (at the expense of everything else) does it create?
> a support burden for their organization.
What? I thought the seller is responsible for what they sell? Don't we have things like brands and trust or authorized sellers?
Did you actually read the linked discussion before jumping in to argue?
Your questions have already been answered.
Yes I have read the forum post and discussions here before commenting.
I can fall victim to scams if I willingly take the risk and buy something cheaper than official authorized sellers offer. Thanks to this risk I haven't yet lost all my brain cells or critical thinking yet.
But if I do, I can always complain about pretty much everything to Raspberry Pi which'd undoubtedly increase support burden for them since they apparently can use AI or post copy-paste responses only when it's not the user complaining (or they just complain about locked hardware = no support burden then, these complaints are ok).
Doesn't me losing my brain due to corporations treating me like a toddler count as a broader systemic risk to you? Probably not, but how about me AND YOU losing consumer choice?
Swapping RAM chips on a board is something a tiny minority of customers would want to do.
Giving that tiny minority that freedom, at the expense of opening up the vast majority of other customers to potential problems, is a dumb choice to make (IMO), which is why they didn't make it.
On the topic of choice, perhaps YOU could choose to buy a thing that does what you want, rather than expecting every product to cater to your needs, regardless of whether it makes sense for it to do so or not.
> Currently a minority would want to
By themelves or in general? If it's the latter, it's because currently rpi offers relatively fair pricing. If they started charging 10x that amount, more would be interested in 3rd party upgrades..
> at the expense of opening up the vast majority of other customers to potential problems
Who forces you to take the risk and buy from a 3rd party supplier at a cheaper price? You did not address my point about trust, brands and reputation handling these problems for years.
> On the topic of choice, perhaps YOU could choose to buy a thing that does what you want
That's precisely why I care. I'm not taking away your ability to buy original products from authorized sellers.
But you accepting ever increasing enshittification and contempt for the consumer, paired with the economics of scale means that I'll lose my choice soon, as those companies will learn consumers are mostly fine with being screwed like that.
I'll be hit first, yes. But when they go so far that you'll start to complain, it'll be too late because no consumer friendly alternatives will exist on the market by then, thanks to economics of scale and extremely weak antitrust enforcement.
All of the above arguments rely on very unlikely hypotheticals and unrealistic assumptions, sorry.
10x price increases? RPi will have bigger problems than "people want to re-solder new RAM chips on our boards" if that happens. Ironically the amount of competition in this space would put them out of business if they did that.
As for third-party sellers, it's pretty clear to me, if not to you, that the issue is not people knowingly buying from third-parties but rather un-knowingly doing so. The self-evidence of this should be apparent based on what RPi is choosing to do (being the ones with all the data on this).
The entire e-commerce industry is now fragmented with tens of thousands of sellers, huge third-party marketplaces (where it's hard to even tell who you are actually buying from), and online stores that constantly come and go.
You cannot manage counterfeit concerns through "brand and reputation handling" alone. That ship sailed so long ago we don't even know where it is anymore.
> "ever increasing enshittification and contempt for the consumer"
You're making a ridiculous leap here by equating the above with one small company making a pragmatic choice to protect its business and consumers.
I believe in customer choice and I do think it's important to protect it, but I'm not a selfish maximalist who thinks it should be done to my benefit at all cost and in ways that are not realistic or economically feasible for the other parties involved.
That nuance is sorely lacking from your position here.
> Ironically the amount of competition in this space would put them out of business if they did that.
You answered it on your own. The amount they can increase their margins by depends on things such as competition, barrier to entry et al. By convincing your customers that "it's all for your good", they can increase their margins making it harder to compete for those not employing these practices. Eventually we might end up with just a few players in the market like in the DRAM space, and then they absolutely can increase their margins by such amounts..
> As for third-party sellers, it's pretty clear to me, if not to you, that the issue is not people knowingly buying from third-parties but rather un-knowingly doing so.
This is getting hilarious.. batteries in smartphones can be replaced, does that mean when I go to store.google.com or motorola.com (and choose one of their retailers) I can buy a product with unoriginal battery? Wow, why haven't those evil stealth 3p sellers figured it out yet? Such a great evil business model!
(or maybe battery prices haven't increased by such amounts that manufacturers wanted to sneak their margin increase by blaming rising battery costs?)
> The entire e-commerce industry is now fragmented with tens of thousands of sellers, huge third-party marketplaces (where it's hard to even tell who you are actually buying from), and online stores that constantly come and go. You cannot manage counterfeit concerns through "brand and reputation handling" alone. That ship sailed so long ago we don't even know where it is anymore.
Relying on brands and reputation is precisely what I'm doing when buying electronics. Successfully. If you can't do it on your own, perhaps you might also want to contact some humans (those people who provide real answers instead of copy-paste corporate non-responses), this is how my relatives avoid falling for scams. By trusting humans, not for-profit corporations.
And this even works on the darknet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989148), so you simply can't convince me all these mechanics went away, that's ridiculous corporate BS..
> but I'm not a selfish maximalist who thinks it should be done to my benefit at all cost
Ok then, let's see where things go.
Except that they have to deal with angry people who bought a dodgy chipped unit.
Yeah it's stupid, but people doesn't know better, they'll complain loudly Raspberry PI is sh* it doesn't work and the Pi Foundation are scammers.
I can understand why they don't want that.
They could permanently mark the board when they install the RAM on it.
Since, presumably, nobody would try to sell a board with less RAM on it than shipped, a count-down scheme instead of count-up would work.
16GB board: no holes drilled in a marked area; 8GB: one hole drilled; 4GB: two holes drilled; 2GB: three holes drilled.
These things don’t matter to buyers. When the board doesn’t work right or crashes a lot they don’t care which step in their personal supply chain is at fault. They demand the original manufacturer give them a new one for free, which they believe is the terms of the warranty.
That would be the honest way to do it.
Replacing a part voids warranty, this is common and well understood by everybody.
I can't help thinking that they want to sell maxed out devices to max out margin.
In the GitHub issue posted as another comment it's clear that what has happened is:
- 8GB Pi is out of stock / too expensive - due to RAM shortage
- Someone bought a load of non-8GB Pis
- Replaced the RAM with whatever they could get their hands on (cheap enough to be worth the hassle, cheap because no one else wants it even given the ongoing shortage - so probably pretty suspicious / of dubious quality)
- The end user buys it and has no idea it has been modified and the warranty is void
- RPi probably don't want to spend their time supporting it. Probably can't if the memory is a load of crap, even if they wanted to. It gets bricked.
The point here is someone bought something else (a fake pi) than they thought they were getting. Not that someone willingly wanted to go hacking.
It's not Pi's responsibility to police what people do with devices after the devices are sold. If bootleggers are modifying the devices and reselling fraudulent versions, that's between the buyer and the bootlegger and marketplace site where the second transaction happened.
What a world we live in that hot air reworking RAM on a SBC makes any sense. I can kind of understand shanzhai GPUs to get around export restrictions, but RPis?
I would agree except we still live in a world where making a few dollars more a day is a perfectly valid way to make money in alot of places. A bunch of guys in some electronic sweatshop in Vietnam or Indonesia working on pis is a reality.
Maybe your frame of reference is wrong. It makes perfect sense when you have a society with overproduction of people with STEM skills, overcapacity in manufacturing, and has ~18-20% youth unemployment.
Why they want or don't want something doesn't matter at all.
There is always a reason someone does any bad thing. There is always obviously some advantage to the perpetrator.
The fact they are only reacting to some other bad actions doesn't excuse it because there are any number of ways to to react. This way is the one way they chose when they have infinity to choose from.
I seriously doubt that is any more than a theoretical problem, and even if it isn't, so what? People start a warranty claim, send the boards to RPi, they run diagnostics, detect the changed RAM and deny the claim.
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this is such a lousy excuse
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Raspberry Pi been scummy for a while e.g. locking codecs behind extra payments. It seems they've gone full mask off at last.
Got here via Jeff Geerling coverage[0].
0. https://youtu.be/ltofM26akZQ
The codec unlock is a thing of the past pretty much, they dropped the affected hardware decoders entirely in the Pi4/5 [1]. In any case, if the legends of Pis being genuinely affordable options back then are true, I'm fine with it. A lot of (probably most) use-cases don't require these codecs, so paying $1.20 and $2.40 respectively seems reasonable for those who do need it.
[1] https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/
The legends are true. I remember begging my parents to get me a Raspberry Pi sometime in the mid 2010s, and the cheap model was US$25 (and the less-cheap model was $35).
Admittedly, this may be closer to $40-50 in today's money (and didn't include an SD card, but those were more common back then in the era of digital cameras)...
The codecs at least had a reasonable explanation - it took a few dollars off the price of the unit (licensing fees to Microsoft and the like). There was also nothing stopping you from decoding MPEG2 with ffmpeg on the CPU. Those specific codecs aren't even present on newer Pi units.
> raspberrypi locked and limited conversation to collaborators
Way to read the room, jfc. Hardbricking hardware is not the answer, see FTDI.
I get why they are doing that... but I think there should be a way for users to flash a separate firmware, maybe tied to the hardware key similar to the old h264/mpeg license, that allows the usage of a modified board.
PS: Arrest Sam Altman who caused all of this mess in the first place with his market manipulation stunt.