Raspberry Pi 5 EEPROM update now blocks manual RAM upgrades

Dead_Lemon•about 1 hour ago

Raspi is likely going to continue making moves like this, since they have gone public. You can't just have people buying the cheaper 1GiB boards and upgrading them to 4GiB, that's taking potential profits away from the investors...

I doubt many are doing this upgrade, and I think its awesome someone has the tooling & skill to do so. I cannot fathom how this is a threat to RPI. I would assume a community firmware patch will likely release & resolve the limitation (until it becomes a signed binary)

eqvinox•about 1 hour ago

> until it becomes a signed binary

It's already a signed binary, with rollback protection. (According to Reddit comments; I stopped using Raspis a long time ago)

illright•44 minutes ago

In the comments there's a link to consumer rights wiki that includes Raspberry Pi's response to this:

> there may be a minor financial gain in buying a part with say a 2GB part, swapping it for an 8GB part of dubious origin, and reselling it as an 8GB device. However, this brings an element of risk to the user - the board hasn't been tested by us - and is a potential support burden for us, with customers complaining of unreliable devices. We therefore remove the commercial incentive by locking devices to their original RAM size.

Frankly, that sounds pretty reasonable to me

pmx•31 minutes ago

I don't agree. They're stopping the owner of the device from using it how they want to based on a theoretical user who purchases a modded device. There may be some small profit to be had in raw material costs but if you factor in the time it takes to pull off a mod like this, and the number of failures I don't think it's a good argument. Even if it was, why not a warning that you can bypass by setting a config in a txt file in the root of the SD? Or even just typing "I agree I won't bother you about this board" or something?

HackerThemAll•10 minutes ago

Yeah that practice is not unheard of. I can easily imagine having a ready-made device to desolder the original chip out of Raspberry and solder another one, of poor quality and/or counterfeit, and then sell that modded Pi for profit. Heck, remember fake SD cards, USB drives etc.

Therefore I agree with manufacturer's decision.

mrheosuper•about 1 hour ago

Ah this suck, why does every company who goes big have to be hostile to end-user.

Raspberry Pi 5 EEPROM update now blocks manual RAM upgrades

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