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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 a economically sensible way as of yesterday.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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).
>(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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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)...
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 94.3 ms ] threadYeah 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.
I can't help thinking that they want to sell maxed out devices to max out margin.
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.
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.
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.
So no, it's not reasonable at all.
Buy an Apple product if you want what you're stating.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The occasional unlicensed and secret RAM upgrade isn't going to kill the business. It's also a small minority!
• 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.
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?
Your questions have already been answered.
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/therealdreg/ftdibrick
Pepperidge Farm remembers the FTDI driver bricking.
https://www.eurogamer.net/3ds-flashcard-includes-secret-kill...
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...
the only reason why pis are not marked this way is because raspberry didn't wanted to (so far)
> we now also program in some other device attributes, meaning that switching parts of the same size may not work.
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.
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.
> 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?
In short, someone at NVIDIA really hates retail, but loves Chinese sanction busters.
...unless the goal really is locking boards to stock memory configurations.
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!
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.
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.
What fraud are you speaking of?
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.
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.
Sure - if that vendor was proposing a solution, a modified EEPROM perhaps, then all is dandy. But they aren’t.
Don't fall for it.
If it’s represented as a new product or offered with manufacturer’s warranty, that would cross into fraud.
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?
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 a economically sensible way as of yesterday.
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.
The better way would be to make the user able to check for non-original ram.
What the fuck are they talking about?
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.
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.
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.
Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers.
Disagree.
For example, Toradex i.MX8 is supported until 2035 and possibly beyond.
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.
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 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.
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.
Sad to see industry pioneers lose to players that copy them and undercut prices using cheap labor.
Its called competition. Should those „cheap labourers“ not have a job?
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.
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.
Remember when FTDI did this and suddenly medical equipment at some hospital stopped working?
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/microsd-card-failure...
One that I have seen is HMAC(serial||SKU) as a datamatrix/QR, laser-etched onto the top silkscreen and burned into a PROM.
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.
Nah, they got big enough and now you think you can pull Apple tricks, good luck with that.
Got here via Jeff Geerling coverage[0].
0. https://youtu.be/ltofM26akZQ
[1] https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/
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)...
Get fucked. Clearly you want to make all the profit and stop people from upgrading their devices.