- 186comments
- 150comments
- 22comments
- 90comments
- 49comments
- 57comments
- 19comments
- 248comments
- 4comments
- 363comments
- 34comments
- 187comments
- 42comments
- 376comments
- 95comments
- 288comments
- 44comments
- 375comments
- 195comments
- 183comments
- 117comments
- 156comments
- 249comments
- 6comments
- 3comments
- 86comments
- 155comments
- 279comments
- 34comments
- 7comments
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, also cheap enough that no one wants it 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.
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 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
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.
Most blobs have fallen thanks to LLMs.
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.
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.