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Discussion (92 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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...
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(§) 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)
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.
I doubt antitrust would get anywhere on this RAM issue, but antitrust law is not defined in terms of either of those categories.
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.
https://github.com/therealdreg/ftdibrick
Pepperidge Farm remembers the FTDI driver bricking.
https://www.eurogamer.net/3ds-flashcard-includes-secret-kill...
If someone gets updated in the wild (like this person did without realizing they had a counterfeit board), they'll fail to boot.
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.
You can already check whether the RAM has been swapped via https://geekworm.com/blogs/news/prevent-ram-swapped-raspberr....
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.
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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.
If it’s represented as a new product or offered with manufacturer’s warranty, that would cross into fraud.
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.
Remember when FTDI did this and suddenly medical equipment at some hospital stopped working?
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?
(To be clear, I don't know either way; I'm just assuming that this was contemplated because it's easier)
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
AFAIR the EEPROM mostly uses the VideoCore instruction set.
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.
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).
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.
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.
• 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.
So no, it's not reasonable at all.
Buy an Apple product if you want what you're stating.
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.
Excellent comment, worth repeating, thanks
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.
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.
I can't help thinking that they want to sell maxed out devices to max out margin.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.