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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's quite disappointing. Whose hardware is it anyways? Yours, when you pay for it.
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.
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.
this is such a lousy excuse
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.
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.
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.
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.
Excellent comment, worth repeating, thanks
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.
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.
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.
Raspberry Pis, save for RP silicon like rp2040, have always been locked down proprietary black boxes.
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.
could it be construed as anti-competitive to block end-users or resellers from swapping RAM?
No. Price discrimination and locking hardware are not illegal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
What fraud are you speaking of?
Selling modded board as official 8GB SKU with reliability/warranty expectations.
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.
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.
Is there a way to circumvent it other than use ancient firmware?
If it's circumventable, how does it prevent fraud? Seems like it would likely just hurt the enthusiasts.
The better way would be to make the user able to check for non-original ram.
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.
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?
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.
Rich of them to claim that "users will complain" when their platform is built for hobbiests and tinkerers. What a terrible stance.
Maybe originally, I'm sure their larger market share is now the embedded market. The whole compute module thing.
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.
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.
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".
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 because it's easier)
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49783849
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.